Tag: HMP Holloway

For the last few days the Daily Mail and Mail Online have been raging about Max Mosley. They have printed acres about this shocking man and yesterday their headline screamed that even the Labour Party was no longer going to accept the filthy lucre of this pariah. Scoops from Mail Online include footage of that ‘car crash interview’, in which Max calmly and reasonably defended himself and a photo of the ‘violent thug’ which was Max as a young man – that’s a photo of a youthful Max standing next to his mates having a fag. No evidence of any violence, just a young man smoking a fag.

The Mail are denouncing Max because of his role in what the Mail claims was a Nazi themed S&M orgy and are accusing him of having perjured himself. What is really bothering the Mail – and most other newspapers – is that Max is putting up one hell of a battle for effective press regulation. Max is an admirably robust man and because he also has a great deal of money, he represents a very real threat to the UK’s press – which has destroyed many people’s lives yet ignored very serious wrongdoing on the part of other people. British press – I probably don’t have much in common with Max, but I really admire him for taking you on. Do you think that you might have brought the demands that someone somewhere somehow reigns you in upon yourselves?

Max’s orgy of course only hit the headlines because an undercover journo joined in, filmed it and then gave the recording to the press. Max’s S&M party involved him and a number of prostitutes – except that one of them was actually a journo who was only there to sting Max. Max is a consenting adult as was everyone at the orgy. No-one has produced any evidence that suggested that any of the prostitutes were coerced or trafficked. One of them was a PhD student who cheerfully and publicly defended Max. When Max refused to melt away, the only real problem that anyone was able to conjure up was that Max’s wife didn’t know about the orgy. That is a matter for Max’s wife to deal with, not the press.

There was of course a high profile press baron who had a great deal of sex with people to whom he was not married – Lord Rothermere, who owned the Daily Mail. Lord Rothermere was married to Patricia aka Bubbles, who in Aug 1992 died at her villa in Nice ‘from a heart attack after an overdose of sleeping pills’. Not only was Bubbles only 59, but Bubbles managed to gain possession of literally thousands and thousands of tablets, quite legally, which were found in her room after she died. These had been prescribed by Top Doctors – Bubbles had quite a few Top Doctors on tap, in Nice, in London and elsewhere as well. Bubbles’s inquest was performed by Dr Paul Knapman, an alumnus of St George’s Hospital Medical School, who for years was wheeled out to provide an innocuous explanation for suspicious deaths of high profile people. As ever, Knapman asked no questions about obviously worrying aspects to Bubbles’s death. The only Top Doctor of Bubbles’s who was named in the press who had been so liberal with the prescription pad was Douglas Rossdale, whose son is a celeb but not one known to someone of my vintage.

Bubbles died in Aug 1992. Five months after five witnesses to the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal were killed by a firebomb – a few more were found dead in the following months (see post ‘The Silence Of The Welsh Lambs). If I was someone who cared about Bubbles, I would have asked a lot of questions about her demise.

The press claimed that Max’s orgy was ‘Nazi-themed’. This really pissed Max off, because Max is the son of Oswald Mosley who was of course the leader of the British Union of Fascists and Oswald did support Hitler. Max’s mum was Diana, originally Diana Guinness, then Diana Mitford. Oswald and Diana were interned in Holloway in 1940 but in 1943 were released by Home Secretary Herbert Morrison – Peter Mandelson’s grandfather. Diana made embarrassingly appreciative comments about Hitler which no-one in politics has ever forgotten. Max has had to live with that. Max sued for libel over the allegations that his orgy was ‘Nazi- themed’ and won.

Now lest we forget – Oswald Mosley was an elected Tory MP who defected to the Independent Labour Party. He and his first wife Cynthia were committed Fabians during the 1920s. Oswald Mosley was a relative of the Queen Mum – Gawd Bless ‘Er – and when he married Cynthia, the wedding guests included King George V and Queen Mary. Diana was his second wife and he married her at the home of Joseph Goebbels. Hitler was one of the guests.

So Oswald Mosley was friendly with both the Royals and Hitler and Mandy’s grandfather released him from prison. Who exactly is in a position to have a go at Max because of who his father was?

A great many people have had it in for Max ever since he won against a British newspaper in Court.

There was of course one UK newspaper who supported Oswald Mosley and the BUF – it was the Daily Mail. Anyone know about the headline ‘Hurrah For The Blackshirts?’ Mosley had a big following among young working class men in East London – the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 took place between the Mosleyites and the Jews. There were also quite a few aristos who supported Mosley – most of the Mitford family for a start. With whom Thatcher’s friend Baroness Jean Trumpington was mates with. Not many people were as complimentary about Hitler as Diana Mosley was, but a number of British politicians from across the political spectrum did meet Hitler, usually in attempts to prevent war. Including a man called Neville Chamberlain, who was Britain’s Conservative PM. King George VI was delighted that Chamberlain had done this, as were the cheering crowds who thronged through London in celebration.

King George VI issued a statement to the serfs: ‘After the magnificent efforts of the Prime Minister in the cause of peace it is my fervent hope that a new era of friendship and prosperity may be dawning among the peoples of the world’.

Most newspapers supported Chamberlain uncritically and he received thousands of gifts, from a silver dinner service to many of his trademark umbrellas. He must have felt a bit like Lilibet did when she reached her Silver Jubilee or indeed like Charles and Di when they had that Fairytale Wedding. After Di had the fertility tests, just to ensure that she was fit for purpose. As Not The Nine O Clock News quipped at the time ‘I am 19 and do not know what I am letting myself in for’.

The Daily Mail also seems to have forgotten that pre-WWII there was a great deal of anti-semitic feeling in Britain as well as in Europe. Furthermore in the 1930s politics in the UK was polarised – people joined the Communist Party in response to what they perceived to be the threat from facism and people joined Mosley’s party in response to what they perceived to be the threat from communism.

Some elements of the British press remained anti-semitic for a long time even after the horrors of the Holocaust. Nancy Astor – ‘the first woman to be elected as an MP’ (except that she wasn’t, but that’s for another history lesson) – had a real problem with Jewish people and even in the 1960s and 1970s the Astor family newspaper – the impeccably liberal Observer – would not employ Jews.

The Mail has produced images of documents which it maintains are racist leaflets handed out by Max in the early 1960s. Max claims not to remember them and has suggested that they might be forgeries. As someone who has had documents forged about me by both the GMC and Chester Court, I think that Max might well have a point.

The Mail frothed over the racist content of the leaflets. It is certainly true that no mainstream political party today would dare publish the sort of thing that is on those leaflets. Yet the contents of those leaflets reflect common ideas of the time eg. that immigrants would introduce contagious diseases – Top Doctors perpetuated that particular idea as well because of the high rates of TB among Pakistani immigrants, which was actually a consequence of poverty.

In Butetown, Cardiff in 1952 there was a famous miscarriage of justice which resulted in the hanging of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali man who had settled in Wales. He was described in the press as a ‘savage’ and his – white – wife was completely ostracised for decades. Mattan was cleared by the Appeal Court in 1998 who presumably had forgotten that he had been killed by the state and clearing him was a bit pointless.

In the 1964 General Election, Tory candidate Peter Griffiths was elected as MP for Smethwick after some of his supporters campaigned under the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Liberal or Labour’. Griffiths refused to dissociate himself from the catchy rhyme. Griffiths lost the seat in 1966 but was re-elected as Tory MP for Portsmouth North in 1979 and remained in that seat until 1997.

In the West Midlands in the 1960s and 70s it was considered to be electoral suicide to be seen as supporting immigration. Enoch Powell took a stance in the late 1960s and during the 70s which is now seen as nakedly racist but which gained him a massive following among the electorate as result and nearly destroyed the Tory Party when he got cross with them. When I worked at St George’s Hospital Medical School, in 1990 I was told that ‘Enoch was right’ – by a young woman employed in medical research from an upper middle class family who had been to a public school, rather than by any Alf Garnett character.

Other examples of ‘shocking racism’ which I am sure that the Mail would now like to condemn include the experience of the mixed race family of a south Asian academic who moved to Llandegfan on Anglesey in the 1980s. The children were playing in the garden when they were told by some other kids that ‘you niggers shouldn’t be here’. It transpired that before the family had purchased this house in the solidly middle class village favoured by Top Doctors and university staff, a petition had done the rounds and had been handed to the previous owner, begging him not to sell the house to the nigger and his white English wife.

When I worked as a cleaner in the Bangor University halls of residence one summer in the mid 1990s, I heard the Orthodox Jews who had rented the halls for the summer described as ‘dirty Jews’. Which was quite ironic because when one considers Orthodox food preparation rituals, Orthodox Jews are a good deal less dirty than the rest of us.

In the light of the Daily Mail’s concern for sexual morality, perhaps they could explain why Sir David English – Editor of the Mail, 1971-92 and then Chairman of Associated Newspapers, the company which owns the Daily Mail – was a regular at parties thrown by George Carman QC, an alcoholic wife beater who knew about the north Wales/Cheshire paedophile ring, who was retained by Jimmy Savile, whose personal friends included bent police officers and gangsters and who successfully defended ‘Len Fairclough’ of Coronation Street fame when Fairclough stood trial for molesting two children, although Carman knew that he was guilty.

The Daily Mail knew about the criminal conduct on the part of the Top Doctors and the paedophiles’ friends in north Wales as well – because some six years ago I e mailed them about it. I received a reply from a journo so I know that they received my e mail but I heard no more…

Now, rather than having a go at Max and suggesting that he has genetically inherited the trait for being a Nazi (is it a dominant or a recessive gene?) – whom I doubt has perjured himself because he seems to have been quite upfront about that orgy – if the Daily Mail really does want to turn its attention to matters perjury and sexual shenanigans, they could do worse than revisit the doings of two people who were given flattering coverage in the Mail Online just a few days ago – Jeffrey and Mary Archer!

Jeffrey of course has served a prison sentence for perjury and there was evidence that Mary too perjured herself but there was no prosecution. Whereas Jeffrey is simply someone who gets forgiven a great deal by a great many people, Mary is is considered untouchable. On a guest appearance on Have I Got News For You in 2002 Ian Hislop was very rude about Jeffrey. Mary came over all sanctimonious when Hislop pointed out that the reason why so many politicians were behaving so badly was that Jeffrey got away with so much. Mary plaintively asked ‘would you like another free kick?’ and received a round of sympathetic applause. A BBC audience might have been appalled at a satirist making satirical comments about a member of the Lords who has lied, swindled and cheated throughout his entire career, but someone should have explained to them that Mary Archer is no victim.

Jeffrey Archer was born in London but when he was two weeks old his family moved to Somerset, eventually settling in Weston-super-Mare. Archer spent most of his early life there. His father William died in 1956 and was 64 years old when Jeffrey was born. Early in his career, Jeffrey gave conflicting accounts to the press of his father’s supposed – but non-existent – military career. Sadly William Archer was a bigamist, fraudster and conman, who impersonated another William Archer, a deceased war medal holder. Jeffrey’s father was at different times employed as a chewing gum salesman in New York and a mortgage broker in London – in the latter capacity he was charged at the Old Bailey for fraud offences. He absconded to America under the name William Grimwood whilst on bail.

In 1951, Archer won a scholarship to Wellington School, Somerset, not Wellington College, Berkshire, as Archer has claimed in the past. Archer’s mother, Lola, was employed as a journalist on the Weston Mercury, the local newspaper. Her column ‘Over the Teacups’ frequently featured Jeffrey, under the name of ‘Tuppence’.

Tuppence left school with O levels in English literature, art and history. He spent a few years in a variety of different jobs, including training with the army and a short period with the Met. Later on Tuppence worked as a PE teacher first at a prep school in Hampshire and later at Dover College, Kent.

In 1963 Tuppence was offered a place at the Oxford University Dept for Continuing Education to study for a Diploma of Education. The course was based in the department – Tuppence became a member of Brasenose College. There have been claims that Tuppence provided false evidence of his academic qualifications to Brasenose in order to gain entrance eg. the apparent citing of an American institution which was actually a bodybuilding club. It has also been alleged that Tuppence provided false statements about three non-existent A levels and a U.S. university degree. Tuppence’s diploma course only lasted a year, but he spent a total of three years at Oxford.

Tuppence was successful in athletics at Oxford, competing in sprinting and hurdling and becoming President of the Oxford University Athletics Club. Television coverage survives of him making a series of false starts in a 1964 sprint race, but he was not disqualified. He went on to run for England, and once successfully competed for GB.

Tuppence raised money for Oxfam, obtaining the support of The Beatles in a charity fundraising drive. The band accepted his invitation to visit the Principal’s lodge at Brasenose College, where they were photographed with Tuppence and dons of Brasenose, although they did not play there. Even as a student Tuppence was plagued with rumours of financial wrongdoing — fellow undergraduates were amazed that he owned houses and cars with personalised number plates while working part time as an Oxfam fund raiser.

After leaving Oxford, Tuppence continued as a charity fundraiser, initially working as Director General of the National Birthday Trust, a medical charity that promoted safe childbirth. He then joined the United Nations Association (UNA) as its chief fundraiser. The then Chairman of the UNA, Humphry Berkeley, alleged that there were numerous discrepancies in Tuppence’s expense claims whilst he worked at the UNA.

Berkeley’s father, Reginald, was the Liberal MP for Nottingham Central, 1922-24, so he’ll have known David Lloyd George. The Lloyd Georges were a political powerful family for many years, remained hugely influential in north Wales until very recently and a number of their members were very close to the people who facilitated and concealed the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal (see post ’95 Glorious Years!’). Humphry attended Pembroke College, Cambridge and was President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Conservative Association in 1948. His studies were interrupted when he was sent down for two years as a result of a practical joke in which he wrote hoax letters to public figures. Humphrey knew Rab Butler – who was Mr Tory Party for decades – Butler arranged a job for Humphrey at Conservative Central Office during this time. Butler advised Humphrey to keep the hoax letters and their replies safe, and publish them a quarter of a century later (they were published in 1974).

Berkeley set up a PR company. He was Director-General of the UK Council of the European Movement, 1956-57. In the 1959 he was elected as the Conservative MP for Lancaster. Berkeley served on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Western European Union and Council of Europe from 1963. Berkeley was a member of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Berkeley campaigned for homosexual law reform in the mid 1960s. In 2007 The Observer alleged that Berkeley was well known as a homosexual and was unpopular. Berkeley lost his seat in 1966, ascribing his defeat to the unpopularity of the bill on homosexuality that he had introduced.

Berkeley then became Chairman of the UNA. He employed Tuppence to organise the UNA’s flag day. Despite barely increasing the previous year’s total, Tuppence was promoted to organise a dinner at 10 Downing Street which raised over £200,000. Berkeley later accused Tuppence of making false expenses claims whilst working for the UNA.

Some years ago the UNA organised a one day conference in north Wales on drug abuse and invited Dr Dafydd Alun Jones as a key note speaker. I made representation on the grounds that Dafydd was not an appropriate speaker and the material promoting the conference was misleading people as to Dafydd’s reputation and experience. I received a few aggressive e mails refusing to cancel the event or provide more accurate info re Dafydd, so I explained that I would therefore attend the event myself and distribute material providing details of the Mary Wynch case and other aspects of Dafydd’s career. The event was cancelled, but not before I received e mails and phone calls from someone involved with the UNA containing personal information about me which could only have been provided by Dafydd.

I later found out that the UNA conference was organised by someone who had been involved with the UNA for many, many years and who when she was young had been a personal friend of Megan Lloyd George. I understand that this lady may have been completely unaware of what Dafydd had been responsible for, but someone in the UNA will have known at least something about the controversy and complaint which has surrounded Dafydd for at least four decades.

By the time that Tuppence was employed by the UNA, Dafydd had his feet under the table at the North Wales Hospital and was involved in the serious abuse of vulnerable people.

In 1968 Humphry Berkeley resigned from the Conservative Party and joined the Labour Party in 1970. He joined the SDP in 1981 and in 1988 he rejoined Labour. The Govt’s of Ted Heath, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan all concealed the abuses at the North Wales Hospital and of children in care in north Wales and the associated criminality. Dr Death personally knew some of the Top Doctors who were involved.

In July 1966 Tuppence married Mary whom he met at Oxford whilst Mary was a chemistry student.

Tuppence began his career in politics at around the time he was involved with the UNA and served as a Conservative councillor on the GLC (1967–1970).

In 1969 Tuppence set up a fundraising and PR company, Arrow Enterprises. The same year he opened an art gallery in Mayfair. The gallery specialised in modern art, but lost money and Tuppence sold it two years later.

At 29, Tuppence was elected as the Tory MP for Louth in Lincolnshire, holding the seat for the Conservative Party in a by-election in Dec 1969. The national Tory Party had concerns regarding Tuppence’s selection, specifically relating to the UNA expenses allegations made by Humphrey Berkeley. Berkeley tried to persuade Conservative Central Office that Tuppence was an unsuitable candidate. Tuppence brought a defamation action against Berkeley which kept the story out of the press, although a truncated version did appear in The Times. The case was eventually settled out of court, with Tuppence agreeing to pay the legal costs of around £30,000.

During his time as MP for Louth, Tuppence was a regular at the Immingham Conservative Club in the most working-class part of the constituency. Tuppence was on the left of the Conservative Party and rebelled against some of his party’s policies. In 1971, he employed David Mellor, who needed money for his bar finals, to deal with his correspondence. He tipped Mellor to reach the Cabinet. David Mellor has been at the scene of many crimes. He was a junior Minister in the Home Office whilst Dr Dafydd Alun Jones and the paedophile gang in north Wales were allowed to break the law with impunity and their victims were stitched up for serious offences. Mellor was a junior Minister for Health, July 1988-Oct 1989, whilst the DHSS concealed serious criminality in the mental health services and children’s homes in north Wales. Mellor worked for Secretary of State Tony Newton – Newton was one of the Cabinet Ministers whom Alison Taylor, the whistleblowing social worker from Gwynedd, contacted directly about the abuse of children in care in north Wales. Mellor is one of those who in numerous roles ignored the activities of an organised criminal gang who killed witnesses.

In July 1992 Mellor was seriously embarrassed when his mistress Antonia de Sancha flogged her story. Mellor was later framed as a victim at the Leveson Inquiry when it was revealed that parts of de Sancha’s story were not true – I think the bit about Mellor having sex whilst wearing a Chelsea FC shirt was alleged to be untrue. Never mind Mellor, at least you didn’t spend years in a high security hospital after being sexually exploited by Dafydd and his mates and branded dangerous when you complained about it. Mellor left politics after becoming a national joke but found a new life as a DJ when LBC were daft enough to employ him.

In 1974 Tuppence was stung by a fraudulent investment scheme involving a company called Aquablast. He lost his first fortune and was left almost £500,000 in debt. Fearing bankruptcy, he stood down as an MP at the Oct 1974 General Election. By this time, Tuppence and Mary were living in a large house in an exclusive street in South Kensington which they were forced to sell.

While he was a witness in the Aquablast case in Toronto in 1975, Tuppence was accused of taking three suits from a department store. He denied the accusation for years, but in the late 1990s he finally acknowledged that he had indeed taken the suits, although he claimed that at the time he had not realised he had left the shop. No charges were ever brought.

Tuppence wrote his first book in the autumn of 1974, as a means of avoiding bankruptcy. The book was picked up by the literary agent Deborah Owen – Dr Death’s wife – and was published first in the U.S., then in Britain in the autumn of 1976. Dr Death became an MP in 1974, was a junior Minister in the DHSS, 1974-76, then a junior Minister in the Foreign Office, 1976-77 and then Foreign Secretary, 1977-79. A Radio 4 adaption of Tuppence’s first book was broadcast in the early 1980s, by which time Dr Death and the gang of four had made the Limehouse Declaration and hopeful people believed that Dr Death was on the way to being PM. Dr D.G.E. Wood, the corrupt GP who was assisting the paedophile gang and sex traffickers in north Wales, really loved Dr Death. Brown observed that Wood was aligning himself with shits in his own profession once more. A BBC TV adaptation of Tuppence’s book was broadcast in 1990, by which time Dr Death had mercifully imploded.

In 1976 Mary started lecturing in chemistry at Newnham and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge – she remained doing until 1988. So Mary caught the tail end of Mr Tory Party Rab Butler, who was Master of Trinity College, 1965-77. From 1984 to 1991, Mary was a Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum Trust in Cambridge.

In 1977 Mary became a Lloyds ‘name’.

In 1979 Tuppence and Mary purchased the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, a house associated with Rupert Brooke. Every summer, Tuppence and Mary host a lavish garden party in the grounds to celebrate their wedding anniversary. By the early 1980s Tuppence was back in a comfortable financial position and began to hold shepherd’s pie and Krug parties for those to whom he thought it was worth ingratiating himself at his London apartment, which overlooks the Thames and Parliament.

‘Kane and Abel’ (1979) proved to be Tuppence’s best-seller. Like most of Tuppence’s early work it was edited by Richard Cohen. It was made into a TV mini-series by CBS in 1985. The following year, Granada TV screened a 10-part adaptation of another Tuppence bestseller, ‘First Among Equals’. Granada have done Dafydd and the paedophiles many a favour – over years they studiously avoided reporting anything at all about them, even on flagship investigative programmes such as ‘World In Action’.

As well as novels and short stories, Tuppence wrote three stage plays. The first opened in 1987 and ran at the Queen’s Theatre in the West End for over a year. The next one was not well received and closed after a few weeks. Tuppence’s final play opened at the Theatre Royal, Windsor in Sept 2000, before transferring to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in the West End in Dec 2000.

In 1988 Kathleen Burnett accused Tuppence of plagiarising a story that she’d written. Tuppence denied doing any such thing, claiming he’d simply been inspired by the idea.

In 1988 Mary Archer joined the Council of Lloyds Insurance Company, becoming Chair of the Lloyds Hardship Committee the following year.

Tuppence’s political career revived in the 1980s and he became a popular speaker among the Conservative grassroots. He was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party by Thatch in Sep 1985. Tebbit – the Party Chairman – had misgivings, as did others, including Willie Whitelaw and Ted Heath. I am wondering whether like a few other people, Tuppence had found out about the Westminster and Whitehall figures who were abusing children and the lengths to which people at the very top of every major political party were going to conceal this. By 1985, Tebbit, Whitelaw and Heath were all deeply compromised in that they knew about serious criminality. Whitelaw was in it up to his eye-balls, he had been frankly blackmailed by campaigners for a fourth Welsh language TV channel over his concealing of the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal (see posts ‘The Cradle Of Filth’ and ‘A Bit More Paleontology ‘). Lord Wyn Roberts twisted Thatcher’s arm over exactly the same matter in order to achieve the Welsh Language Act (see post ‘The Cradle Of The Filth’). Tuppence taking a leaf out of their book would explain why he bagged the role of Deputy Chairman in the face of opposition from the grandees.

During his tenure as Deputy Chairman, Tuppence was responsible for a number of embarrassments, including claiming during a live radio interview that many young, unemployed people were simply unwilling to find work. At the time, unemployment in the UK stood at a record 3.4 million. Tuppence was later forced to apologise, saying that his words had been ‘taken out of context’.

Tuppence resigned as Deputy Chairman in Oct 1986 due to a scandal caused by an article in The News Of The World, ‘Tory boss Archer pays vice-girl’, which claimed that Tuppence had paid Monica Coghlan, a prostitute, £2,000 through an intermediary at Victoria Station to go abroad.

Two months after Tuppence was exposed in the News Of The World, I was unlawfully arrested and detained by Dafydd at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh (see posts ‘How I Arrived At Denbigh’ and ‘Behind The Scenes – At The North Wales Hospital Denbigh’).

After Tuppence resigned as Deputy Chairman of the Tory Pary, Peter Morrison took over the role. Morrison was the MP for Chester and a member of the paedophile gang which was facilitated by Dr Dafydd Alun Jones and others and was operating in north Wales/Cheshire. A number of leading Tories from that era including Edwina Currie, Rod Richards and Gyles Brandreth have confirmed that Morrison’s activities were well-known, openly gossiped about and that Thatcher was explicitly warned about what he was doing.

It seems that sending victims of and witnesses to those involved with the Westminster Paedophile Ring abroad was the accepted way of doing things in the 1980s. I knew of two students at Bangor University who, like me, found out some of what was happening – one went to America after Wood’s wife, who was a lecturer in the University, arranged matters and Wood tried to coerce the other one into emigrating to Australia and even arranged a job there for her, although the thought terrified her (see post ‘Just A Language Divide?’). Wood became very angry when this young woman became distressed and refused to be transported to the other side of the world. Down in south Wales, George Thomas aka Lord Tonypandy paid a man who had been abused by him to begin a new life in Australia (see post ‘It Wasn’t On Our Radar’).

God knows how much of this was going on if I personally knew of two students on the same degree as me at Bangor who were identified as needing to be dealt with in this way.

Shortly after The News of the World story broke, the Daily Star ran a story alleging that Tuppence had paid for sex with Coghlan, something that The News Of The World had been careful to avoid stating . Tuppence responded by suing the Daily Star. The case came to court in July 1987. Explaining the payment to Coghlan as the action of a philanthropist claiming that he had been ‘duped’ by her and set up by the News of the World, Tuppence won the case and was awarded £500,000 damages, a record amount in a libel action at the time. The action cost Express Newspapers – which owned the Daily Star – more than £1 million. Tuppence’s Counsel was Robert Alexander QC.

Now here are a few Interesting Facts about Robert Alexander. Alexander was born and died in areas with long standing paedophile rings which resulted in serious criminal activity in the 1980s – Staffordshire and Lambeth. Alexander went to Brighton College – the old school of Keith Best, a barrister and the Tory MP for Ynys Mon, 1979-87, who in his capacity as a junior Minister in the Welsh Office concealed the paedophile and sex trafficking gang operating in north Wales (see post ‘The Cradle Of Filth’). Best was a Brighton Borough Councillor, 1976–80. John Allen, who owned and managed the Bryn Alyn Community in north Wales where children were severely abused, also owned brothels in Brighton to which he trafficked children in care from north Wales. Allen is now serving yet another prison sentence for abusing children. After his election, Best was driving when his car was involved in an accident resulting in the death of his personal assistant. Best was cleared of responsibility.

In Sept 1987, Best was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment for fraud in relation to his application for BT shares and was fined £3,000. On 5 Oct 1987, the Court of Appeal released him but increased his fine.

Peter Morrison was appointed as Energy Minister with responsibility for oil in June 1987 (see post ‘These Sharks Are Crap As Well’) – the month before Tuppence hit the jackpot at the libel trial. During this month, the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal was at its height. This provided a most useful distraction from the child abuse and criminal activities in north Wales at a time when Alison Taylor, Mary Wynch and I were all raising concerns and producing evidence of serious criminality (see post ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas And The Culprits Were Named’). Two of the leading lights in the paedophile gang in north Wales – Matt Arnold and Peter Howarth – had previously worked in Gateshead and Dr Neil Davies and Professor Bob Woods, two colleagues of Dafydd’s, had worked in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne before they joined Dafydd et al in north Wales (see post ‘The Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Connection?’). Lord John Walton, President of the GMC, 1982-89 (whilst complaints about Gwynne the lobotomist and Dafydd poured in but no action was taken) and the BMA 1980-82, provided an umbrella for Dafydd et al for years – John Walton was Mr Newcastle Medical School (see post ‘Little Things Hitting Each Other’).

In Jan 1987 Alison Taylor, the whistleblowing social worker from Gwynedd, told Thatcher that she had witnessed children in care being abused in north Wales. In March 1987, David Gillinson was imprisoned for gross indecency against a boy in care in north Wales. Gillinson was a leading light in the Chester branch of CHE (the Campaign for Homosexual Equality). A number of people alleged that the branch was a front for paedophilia.

Whilst Tuppence was hamming it up in Court, the north Wales mental health services attempted to frame and imprison me for ‘stabbing a doctor’ – Risley Remand Centre and the Mental Health Act Commission colluded with this (see post ‘Workers’ Play Time’). Shortly after, Dafydd tried to threaten and then bribe me into dropping my complaints – Brown was listening in to the phone call and wrote to Gwynedd Health Authority about the matter. He did not receive a reply. The attempt to fit me up for trying to stab someone failed but the police did bring a public order charge against me and an ‘expert opinion’ was supplied by Dr James Earp, a forensic psychiatrist in Leicester. Earp concealed the criminal actions of Dafydd et al in north Wales (see post ‘An Expert From England’). At the time, Earp and his colleagues were concealing the abuse of children in Leicestershire, with which Frank Beck and Greville Janner were involved (see post ‘Radical Leicester and Some Other Free Radicals’).

In Oct 1987 DCS Gwynne Owen, who had been given responsibility for investigating the assaults on children in north Wales which Alison Taylor had reported, submitted a second report to the CPS regarding Alison, saying that ‘there is every likelihood…she will manipulate others in the future to make similar complaints’. Every mental health patient whom I knew in north Wales who complained about Dafydd and the paedophiles’ associates was branded ‘manipulative’. I later discovered that the same word was used to describe the kids in care who complained about being abused. Even the whistleblower was manipulative.

Those poor put-upon paedophiles and gangsters – all they had was the full force of the Gov’t and the security services in the face of these manipulative bastards who were complaining about being beaten up, sexually assaulted, fitted up and wrongfully imprisoned…

Alison was sacked from her job as a social worker with Gwynedd County Council in Dec 1987. The Director of Gwynedd Social Services was Dafydd’s mistress Lucille Hughes.

Robert Alexander was Chairman of the Bar Council, 1985-86. He was given a peerage in July 1988. In July 1988 Elizabeth Butler-Sloss submitted her whitewash regarding the extent of the horror which was the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal (see post ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas And The Culprits Were Named’) which was a useful distraction to complaints that there was serious criminality in north Wales involving organised child abuse.

Robert Alexander was Chairman of the NatWest Bank, 1989-99 and the President and Chair of the Marylebone Cricket Club – from which Tuppence was suspended for 7 years in 2002 in the wake of his conviction for perjury . Robert Alexander sat on the Wakeham Commission – John Wakeham had been Secretary of State for Energy whilst Peter Morrison was a Minister in that Dept.

Robert Alexander was Chancellor of Exeter University, 1998-05. Sir Steve Smith, the VC of Exeter University, was appointed in 2002. Smith had previously been Senior PVC at Aberystwyth University and whilst he was in post there was a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth. Aber had for years been churning out law graduates who provided great assistance to the paedophile gang once those law graduates had embarked on careers as lawyers and judges, but when Sir Steve started giving out the orders, Aber really hit the buffers.

In the wake of Smith being appointed VC at Exeter, Professor Edzard Ernst became involved in a dispute with Prince Charles regarding complementary medicine. Edzard had a nasty habit of conducting rigorous research which demonstrated that homeopathy and a number of other complementary therapies were clinically ineffective. Charles’s Secretary Sir Michael Peat pressurised the University to discipline Ernst for being a competent scientist who refused to fabricate his results. Edzard was investigated by the University and cleared but was then frozen out by the University authorities. Fundraising for his unit ceased and the unit was gradually strangled. Edzard took early retirement, but he now maintains an excellent website exposing bad science.

Edzard’s book ‘A Scientist In Wonderland’ provides a full account of what Exeter University did to him when Charles got cross.

In 2012, Sir Steve Smith – together with the Vice-Chancellor of Plymouth University – announced the demerger of Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry and the establishment of the University of Exeter Medical School and the Plymouth University ‘Peninsula’ Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. That institution is collaborating in the research fraud that is Professor Mark Williams’s Mindfulness – Williams discovered the miracle of Mindfulness when he worked in Bangor with the paedophile gang in the late 1980s (see post ‘The Biggest Expert Of The Lot’). Some of the leading lights in patient abuse in Gwynedd at that time such as Keith Fearns are thanked and cited in Williams’s work. Mark Williams denied a holocaust on the level of David Irving.

For details of my own experiences with Sir Steve’s Medical School, please see post ‘NHS Chief Executive Collapses In Court After Being Spared Jail’.

Meanwhile photos of Steve appeared in the Times Higher at social events with a glass of champagne in his hand accompanied by quotes from students telling the readers what a great bloke he was. It’s quite easy to get students to do this, you just select undergrads who aren’t working with people like Edzard Ernst and supply them with nibbles and booze and then you send Steve along to do his man of the people bit and sink a bit of alcohol in front of the students and they leave happy. The same sort of tactics can be employed when it’s time for the students to fill in their National Student Survey forms, you feed them pizza and chocolate brownies and then give them the forms to complete.

Brown tells me that the technique works with external inspectors as well – but it takes a little bit more skill than with the undergrads. You’ve got to give the inspectors a good lunch, but you mustn’t make it too good or it looks like you’re trying to bribe them. I’m sure that Sir Steve has it down to a fine art.

I’m happy to tell those readers who don’t work at the coal face in universities that Laurie Taylor’s Poppleton University column in the Times Higher doesn’t begin to capture the insanity which has been inflicted upon universities since Blair and Lord Adonis had a few brainwaves.

Laurie Taylor’s son Matthew was Blair’s policy advisor.

Some years ago Bangor University received a gift from Exeter University in the form of Professor Hilary Lappin-Scott, a fighter for gender equality. Hilary nearly destroyed Bangor in the short time that she was there and was such a wrecking ball that people seriously wondered if she was being paid by a rival institution to damage Bangor. Hilary left after a major disagreement with the VC whose institution probably wouldn’t have been still standing if she had remained at Bangor much longer. She then re-appeared at Swansea University. Since Hilary’s arrival, the students at Swansea have protested, senior staff have resigned and the Business School almost imploded. But Hilary has won an award for being an inspirational woman and has had her photo taken with Princess Anne. For the details of Hilary’s time at Bangor, see post ‘News Round-Up, March 16 2017’.

In 1990, the corrupt barrister George Carman – who knew about the paedophile gang in north Wales/Chesire as well as about the politicians and Whitehall mandarins who were abusing children and who was retained by Jimmy Savile (see posts ‘No Ordinary Methods’ and ‘No Ordinary Methods – Supplementary Post’) – acted for businessman Rolf Schild in a libel case against Express Newspapers. Carman lost against Robert Alexander QC, who was acting for Express Newspapers. Judge Sir William Mars-Jones upheld an appeal against Carman. Despite Carman’s defeat – and Carman was a barrister whom it was alleged hated losing – Carman remained good mates with Sir John Junor, the Editor of the Sunday Express and they enjoyed a good lunch together shortly after Carman lost the appeal.

As for William Mars-Jones – he was a farmer’s son from Denbighshire who hit the big time and was President of UCNW (Bangor University), 1982-95), whilst Gwynne the lobotomist and Dr DGE Wood the corrupt GP worked in the Student Health Centre, facilitating the sex trafficking gang. Not only that, but whilst Mars-Jones was President, both the Depts of Social Work and Psychology at UCNW contained staff who had worked with the paedophile gang and trained people who then worked with the paedophile gang after they graduated. Other people in UCNW were associated with the paedophile gang as well and yet more people in the institution knew about it all and were keeping schtum. Dafydd himself exerted considerable influence over UCNW and the Principal Sir Charles Evans who had worked as a neurosurgeon in Liverpool knew what was going on but wasn’t that concerned (see post ‘A Bit More Paleontology’).

William Mars-Jones intimidated everyone in north Wales what with being based in London and spending his time troughing in the Garrick with lawyers and judges (see post ‘A Big Umbrella’). The Garrick is also very popular with thespians – Tuppence basked in the light of his success in West End theatres…

I have retold the tale of the 1990 case involving Carman, Alexander, Rolf Schild, John Junor and Express Newspapers because it illustrates something that I have become acutely aware of whilst researching for this blog – that where this bunch are concerned, deals were very obviously done behind closed doors which were not always for the benefit of the client who thought that they had purchased legal representation. If any of the parties involved had knowledge of Thatcher’s mate or any of the others who were having sex with children or of victims and witnesses who were being found dead, it was that which provided the focus for the horse-trading.

The Presiding judge over the libel trial, Mr Justice Caulfield, was quite taken with Tuppence’s bird. When instructing the jury, Justice Cocklecarrot commented: ‘Remember Mary Archer in the witness-box. Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? How would she appeal? Has she had a happy married life? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband Jeffrey?’

Cocklecarrot then went on to say of Tuppence, ‘Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?’.

There is evidence to suggest that Tuppence most certainly was, despite the elegant, fragrant Mary. Cocklecarrot made derogatory comments about every aspect of Monica, including her ‘green leatherette suit’. Monica was actually doing a roaring trade in London at the time – as of course was John Allen, using the boys from the children’s homes in north Wales which had ended up in his clutches thanks to Dafydd and Lucille – so there clearly was no shortage of men with money to spend who were quite keen on the idea of green leatherette suits and other things. Furthermore, as many commentators mentioned at the time, men do not use prostitutes because the missus is too fat and ugly to get a man. Like those bloody feminists.

Cocklecarrot did and said a few other strange things in that trial as well. After the jury had begun their deliberations, Cocklecarrot recalled them after admitting to 12 ‘inaccuracies and mistakes’ in his summing up, following written representation from the defence Counsel. Cocklecarrot’s conduct was described as ‘extraordinary’ by many observing lawyers. Cocklecarrot also expressed his deep gratitude to the jury after they had to endure a whole three week trial and excused them from jury service for 15 years. Which reminds me of the Peter Cook quip re the biased judge modelled on Jeremy Thorpe’s trial ie. ‘now you must retire – as must I’.

If I suggested that the jury might have discovered that their bank accounts were so flush in the wake of that trial that they’d never have to work again anyway, no doubt someone would sue me for libel.

Nearly all information about Cocklecarrot has disappeared from the internet.

As for Monica who was roundly insulted by Cocklecarrot – she was born in Greater Manchester in 1951 and suffered a troubled childhood, leaving school at 15. After leaving home Monica was the victim of a violent sexual attack and forced to leave her flat. She was working as a prostitute at 17, and in the next 18 years was convicted of shoplifting, possession of cannabis and prostitution and served two prison terms. In 1985 she had a son, Robin, and moved into a small bungalow in Rochdale. For most of the week she cared for her son alone following the death of her partner – it was her partner’s death which prompted Monica to return to prostitution – and at weekends Robin was left with neighbours or relatives whilst Monica worked as a prostitute in London.

Monica picked Tuppence up at Shepherd Market in Mayfair in Sept 1986. Aziz Kurtha, an Indian businessman, saw them together and sold the story to the News of the World. Monica did not know who Tuppence was when she met him – she said that he told her he was a car salesman. Rather than print the unverified story, the News of the World decided to organise a ‘sting’ by getting Coghlan to ask Tuppence for money to stay silent. On 24 Oct 1986, the News Of The World filmed and audiotaped Michael Stacpoole, a representative of Tuppence, giving Coghlan £2,000 in £50 notes on Platform 3 of London’s Victoria Station to leave the country.

Coghlan received £6,000 for her part in the newspaper sting and was initially reluctant to take part at all. Many journalists who worked on that story were convinced that she was telling the truth. Monica stood by her story until her death. In court Monica was in tears, distressed at the ordeal to which she was being subjected. Accused of lying by Robert Alexander QC, Monica replied: ‘He’s the liar…. Just because he’s got power and money…I might be a prostitute, but I’ve never harmed anybody, okay, I’ve just survived all my life. He knows that it’s him, he knows it’.

Monica stopped working as a prostitute after the trial and worked as a bingo caller, but Rochdale continued to associate her with prostitution and scandal. She later said that ‘Jeffrey Archer took everything away from me, I lost my home, my dignity, my self-respect, and any hope of a future’.

Whilst Justice Cocklecarrot, Tuppence and Mary were busy in Court, I was living in Leicester with Brown. I was still trying to get some answers out of the north Wales mental health services so I wrote constantly. I had become so frustrated at the threats, the harassment, the criminality and the obvious naked corruption that a lot of my letters contained satirical comments. I had been following Tuppence’s trial and in one of my letters to Alun Davies – one of the corrupt managers of the mental health services in north Wales – which I wrote shortly after the trial ended, I made a reference to Aziz Kurtha, who had commented that if one lies with dogs one will catch fleas. Many years later after my lawyer served a High Court injunction upon the North West Wales NHS Trust to force them to release my files which they had unlawfully witheld, I found copies of all the letters that I’d written, including the letter in which I referred to Tuppence’s trial and Aziz Kurtha. Guess what? Someone had underlined my comments about Tuppence’s trial and Aziz Kurtha’s evidence…I could find no reference as to who had done this or why they had done it, but it was very obvious. I of course did not receive a reply to my letter which was dealing with serious matters, but what had really bothered someone was my interest in the adventures of Tuppence and the man who had taken the evidence against him to the tabloids.

Without knowing that this had happened, because my letters about serious criminal misconduct were going unanswered at about this time I rang the North Wales Hospital Denbigh in an attempt to speak to Dafydd himself. I was being fed what were obvious lies by his secretary – ‘he’s not here’, ‘we don’t know where he is’, ‘we don’t know when he’ll next be here’ – and I got so fed up that I said ‘well tell him I’m speaking to a tabloid newspaper tomorrow’ and I put the phone down. Twenty minutes later the phone rang and Brown answered it – Brown handed me the phone saying ‘that worked a treat, it’s Jones…’

So it was!

Poor old Jones – he still couldn’t find it in him to answer my questions and investigate my complaint, all I got were more attempts at bribery and corruption…

Tuppence – do you know anything about any of this???

Although Tuppence and er indoors claimed they were a normal, happily-married couple at the time of the trial, according to the journalist Adam Raphael they were living largely separate lives. Lloyd Turner, the editor of the Daily Star, was sacked six weeks after the trial by the paper’s Chairman David Stevens. On 27 March 1987 – two months before the trial -Stevens had been given a peerage. Stevens sat as a Tory until 2004, then defected to UKIP. Raphael found proof that Tuppence had perjured himself at the trial, but his superiors were unwilling to take the risk of a libel case. The News of the World later settled out of court with Tuppence, acknowledging they, too, had libelled him. David Montgomery, the former Editor of the News of the World, admitted to the Star libel jury that the story ‘implied’ that Tuppence had sex with Monica.

Rupert Murdoch owned the News of the World. By the time that Tuppence was suing people for libel and Montgomery was admitted to libelling Tuppence when he hadn’t, Montgomery had been promoted by Murdoch to the post of Director of News (UK) Limited, a subsidiary of News International.

Tuppence’s mate Thatcher and Murdoch had a symbiotic relationship – Thatch passed laws enabling Murdoch to break the print unions and in return Murdoch ensured that Thatcher carried on winning elections. When Montgomery left Murdoch’s employment Murdoch became Chief Executive of Mirror Group plc, in the wake of Cap’n Bob going overboard. (Am I really the only person who believes that Cap’n Bob was not the sort of man to kill himself, even if he had stolen the pension fund and knew that he was about to be caught?) Not only was Montgomery related to the Lloyd George clan by marriage, but he was a big mate of Amanda Platell. Platell was William Hague’s Press Officer, 1999-01 – which covered the period of the publication of the Waterhouse Report when Hague anticipated being in need of as many friends in the media as possible. For details of Montgomery, Platell and Platell’s people, see post ‘Did Glenda Occupy A Key Role In Keeping It All Out Of The Media?’

Lord Stevens Chaired United Newspapers for many years – the company was founded by David Lloyd George. In 1996, United Newspapers took over MAI, the consortium which formed Meridian Broadcasting in 1991 – in 1994 the company brought Anglia Television. By 1994 Mary Archer was a Director of Anglia Television. Mary was a non-executive Director of Mid Anglia Radio plc, 1988-95, which I think was also part of Meridian.

In 1988 Mary Archer joined the Council of Lloyds Insurance Company, becoming Chair of the Lloyds Hardship Committee the following year.

When Saddam Hussein suppressed Kurdish uprisings in 1991, Tuppence, along with the Red Cross, set up the charity Simple Truth, to fund raise for the Kurds. In May 1991, Tuppence organised a charity pop concert starring Rod Stewart, Paul Simon and Gloria Estafen, who all performed for free. Tuppence claimed that his charity had raised £57,042,000, though it was later revealed that only £3 million came from the Simple Truth concert and appeal. The rest was from aid projects sponsored by the British and other governments, with significant amounts pledged before the concert. The charity would later result in further controversy.

In Feb 1991 HM Lilibet knighted Peter Morrison. I was sitting in Springfield Hospital at the time facing serious charges as a result of the perjury of those in the north Wales mental health services.

By May 1991 allegations of a paedophile ring in north Wales involving Thatcher’s Ministers were flying and had appeared in the London-based press. Police investigations were underway but repeatedly failed to find any evidence.

By May 1991 I had been hounded out of my job at St George’s Hospital Medical School, whose staff – along with the staff of Springfield Hospital the associated mental health unit – had colluded with the criminal activities of Dafydd, Tony Francis (Dr X) and Gwynedd Social Services (see post ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London…). My best friend from school who knew what had happened to me in north Wales and had wanted to make a documentary about it had been unlawfully dismissed from her job at the Royal Television Society. Her husband worked at the BBC in London and was told that they would ensure that he ‘never worked in this town again’. Shortly after, he was transferred to Manchester and was then made redundant. Another of my housemates from my days at Bangor was gradually being forced out of his job with a pharmaceutical company in Kent.

At the same time I was fighting further battles with the north Wales mental health services as they repeatedly tried to imprison me – although their own lawyers and the MDU knew that they had perjured themselves (see post ‘The Sordid Role Of Sir Robert Francis QC’). By March 1991 I was back living near Bethesda – yet cases against me were being heard in London and on one occasion in the spring of 1991 I was even summoned to the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.

On 7 May 1991 Yorkshire Television screened ‘The Secret Of Castle Hill’, a documentary about the abuse of children in a school in Shropshire for which the headmaster Ralph Morris was imprisoned (see post ‘The Mentor’). Yorkshire Television had originally planned to make a film about the abuse of children in north Wales and even filmed Alison Taylor in Sept 1989 for the documentary. In Feb 1990 Yorkshire Television abandoned the documentary about north Wales in favour of one about Castle Hill. Between June 1987-July 1990 Peter Morrison was Minister of Energy with responsibility for oil. Unbeknown to me, even though I was working in London at the time, in April 1989 Tony Francis, Lucille Hughes et al in collaboration with the Welsh Office and the Mental Health Act Commission were carrying out a plan to have me declared dangerous and incarcerated in a secure hospital. The plan’s grand finale took place in Oct 1989 when Dr Chris Hunter, a forensic psychiatrist of whom I had never heard let alone met, held a case conference about me in north Wales, declared me ‘extremely dangerous’ and offered everyone a court report about me – not that I was under arrest or facing any charges (see post ‘The Night Of The (Dr Chris) Hunter’).

On 30 May 1991 the Report into the Staffordshire Pindown Scandal was published – this Report condemned the abuse of children which had occurred but went nowhere near to admitting the extent of the criminality involved or the number of people who colluded with it (see post ‘Always On The Side Of The Children’).

On 15 March 1992 dawn raids were carried out on properties in the Wrexham area and 17 people were arrested, all of whom were former or serving staff of Bryn Estyn. Everyone arrested but four was released without charge by the end of the day. Police claimed that no evidence of child porn or a paedophile ring had been discovered. Of the four charged, only three were ever convicted – some three years later.

Having previously been rejected for a peerage, Tuppence finally became Lord Tuppence on 27 July 1992. On 9 April 1992, John Major won the General Election – the nation had a choice of three potential PMs, Major, Kinnock and Paddy Pantsdown, all of whom knew about Westminster figures abusing children and the carnage in north Wales as a result of silencing witnesses. Peter Morrison stood down as an MP at that election. Days later five witnesses to the paedophile ring which didn’t exist in north Wales were killed by a firebomb which was thrown into a flat in Brighton whilst they attended a party there (see post ‘The Silence Of The Welsh Lambs’). Days later the man who had allegedly confessed to starting the blaze was killed when he was hit by a lorry on a quiet country road. One party goer who survived claimed that witnesses to the wrongdoing in north Wales were being murdered. He was later found dead after giving evidence against John Allen in court, days before he was due to receive a payment from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.

A whole batch of people received peerages in 1992 – including John Wakeham, Peter Morrison’s former boss – and virtually all of them had played a role in concealing the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal.

PM John Major recommended Tuppence for a peerage because of Tuppence’s role in aid to the Kurds. Tuppence and Major had been friends for some years. Major had been a junior Health Minister in Thatcher’s Gov’t when the barrel of shit in north Wales was being concealed by Ken Clarke (see post ‘Running The Country – And All That Jazz’). Major had worked in the DHSS as a Minister whilst Trumpers was a Health Minister, when Trumpers appointed Jimmy Savile to the management team of Broadmoor – although it was actually Trumpers’s colleague Edwina Currie who took the rap for it years later. Savile’s mate Alan Franey, the former Assistant General Manager of Leeds General Infirmary, was appointed CEO of Broadmoor. Whilst Savile was in post, two female patients killed themselves as a result of his abuse of them. During Major’s time at the DHSS, Brian McGinnis was the Whitehall mandarin responsible for mental health and high security hospitals – McGinnis was later banned from working with children (see post ‘Socio-Political Context Of The North Wales Mental Health Services In The 1980s’).

In a speech in Oct 1993 at the Conservative conference, Tuppence urged Home Secretary Michael Howard, to ‘Stand and deliver’, saying: ‘Michael, I am sick and tired of being told by old people that they are frightened to open the door, they’re frightened to go out at night, frightened to use the parks and byways where their parents and grandparents walked with freedom … We say to you: stand and deliver!’. Tuppence then attacked violent films and urged tougher prison conditions to prevent criminals from re-offending. He criticised the role of ‘ do-gooders’ and finished off the speech by denouncing the opposition party’s law and order policies. This was a time when Tuppence was actively seeking another front-line political role.

At the same conference John Major launched his Back to Basics campaign. If any of those old maids of whom Major was so fond had been cycling to church in the mist after having witnessed the wrongdoing of Dafydd they’d have been run over and killed in yet another uninvestigated hit and run.

In 1993 I was prosecuted at Bangor Magistrates Court for staring at a social worker, Jackie Brandt, in Safeways – the original allegations were that I had yelled and sworn at her, but once in the witness box Brandt started crying and admitted that she’d told a pack of lies. Brandt attempted to have me arrested on another two occasions as well and many years later when I was leaving a dentists in Bangor, Brandt’s husband started yelling and shaking his fist at me in front of a packed waiting room. There were never any investigations into Brandt or her husband but there were a lot of investigations into me.

Mary Wynch – who had some years previously successfully sued Dafydd and the Home Office after she was unlawfully arrested, imprisoned and then detained in the North Wales Hospital for a year – was stuffed over and ruined by Michael Howard and the Home Office in 1994 (see post ‘The Mary Wynch Case – Details’).

In Oct 1993 Ron Davies was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Wales. Ron had previously been an education advisor for Mid-Glamorgan Education Authority whilst that Authority failed to act on complaints of school teacher John Owen sexually abusing his pupils (see post ‘Yet More Inglorious Bastards’). In Oct 1998 Ron resigned as Secretary of State for Wales after he was caught with his trousers down in the company of a male prostitute called Boogie – just as Blair was about to inflict him on Wales as First Secretary (see post ‘The Cradle Of Filth’). After Ron was exposed – so to speak – people came crawling out of corners in south Wales saying that he was a deeply unpleasant man and that his visits to gay massage parlours from which he returned ‘looking relaxed’ were common knowledge.

It was at the time that Ron became Shadow Secretary of State for Wales – his big break – that two witnesses to child abuse and criminality condoned by the authorities in north Wales had their lives wrecked as described in my post ‘It’s All About Protecting Children’.

On Question Time in Jan 1994, Tuppence said that 18 should be the age of consent for gay sex, as opposed to 21, which it was at the time. Tuppence though was opposed to the age of consent for gay men being 16.

It was at this time that Robert Kilroy-Silk presented a debate regarding the age of consent for gay sex on his show. The most dreadful bunch of bigots had been invited on, including a Top Doctor who told a lot of lies – he came out with the old myth of ‘ooh you don’t find homosexuality in the animal kingdom’. Oh yes you do, I spent my teenaged years in Somerset marvelling at gay animals – in particular a lesbian sheepdog who belonged to a neighbouring farmer. That dog, called Lassie no less, was notorious and the teenaged boys in the area constantly obsessed about Lesbian Lassie. All rural kids come across gay animals so where this Top Doctor had been all his life I do not know. The one person who opposed the sea of bigotry was Edwina Currie who was also a guest. I wasn’t a fan of Edwina’s, but she was pretty good on that occasion. So I wrote to her – and I received an immediate reply. Which was a very much better response than whenever I wrote to anyone about the criminal conduct of Dafydd and the paedophiles.

Guess what happened within a couple of weeks of me writing to Edwina and complimenting her on her Kilroy appearance? Dafydd was invited onto Kilroy as a guest! Just as the complaints rained down from livid, damaged patients about Dafydd – complaints which were never investigated – and the demands for a Public Inquiry into the alleged paedophile ring in north Wales grew louder and louder. Then Dafydd turned up repeatedly on the TV – the Vincent Kane Debates, on BBC Wales, on S4C, all providing Dafydd with free publicity (see post ‘Oh, No! It’s The Pathetic Sharks’).

Dafydd was a graduate of Liverpool University Medical School and had an extensive network on Merseyside, which went back years (see post ‘These Sharks Are Crap As Well’). Kilroy-Silk had previously been a lecturer in Liverpool University and then a Labour MP on Merseyside. When Kilroy-Silk was an MP he was mates with John Golding, the then Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, a man who knew all about Dafydd and the paedophiles (see post ‘News From Sicily’).

In Jan 1994, in her capacity as a Director of Anglia Television, Mary attended a Directors’ meeting at which an impending takeover of Anglia Television by MAI, which owned Meridian Broadcasting, was discussed. The following day, Tuppence bought 50,000 shares in Anglia Television, acting on behalf of a friend, Broosk Saib. Shortly after this, it was announced publicly that Anglia Television would be taken over by MAI. As a result, the shares jumped in value, whereupon Tuppence sold them on behalf of his friend for a profit of £77,219. The arrangements that he made with the stockbrokers meant he did not have to pay at the time of buying the shares.

An inquiry was launched by the Stock Exchange into possible insider trading. The DTI, headed by Michael Heseltine, announced that Tuppence would not be prosecuted due to insufficient evidence. His solicitors – Tuppence was represented by Lord Mischon – admitted that Tuppence had made a mistake, but Tuppence later said that he had been exonerated.

Victor Mishcon was a member of the Wolfenden Committee on homosexual law reform in the 1950s. He was a Councillor for Lambeth throughout that Council’s various incarnations, 1945-67. Investigations into the organised abusive of children in the care of Lambeth found that there was endemic sexual abuse of children in care stretching back to the late 1940s which was known about by Councillors but ignored. Mishcon was given a peerage in 1978 by Jim Callaghan. Who, along with his Gov’t, had concealed the abuse of children in care in north Wales and elsewhere. Callaghan knew that George Thomas, a south Wales Labour MP who later became the Speaker of the House, was molesting children (see post ‘It Wasn’t On Our Radar’). Mishcon was the Labour Home Affairs Spokesman in the Lords, 1983-90 and Shadow Lord Chancellor, 1990-92. Obviously a good mate of Kinnock’s then! The Kinnock who, along with his wife, knew all about the abuses in north Wales – the Kinnock who was at university with Tony Francis… (see post ‘The Cradle Of Filth’).

Lord Mishcon’s company acted for Diana during her divorce from Charles.

Tuppence and Mary were now towering figures in Cambridgeshire society. In 1993, Mary was appointed a non-executive Director of Addenbrookes Hospital NHS Trust, a role in which she remained until 1999, when she became Vice-Chairman. She remained in that role until 2002, when she then became Chairman of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (incorporating Addenbrookes and Rosie Hospitals), a role she retained until 2012.

Mary and Tuppence knew the dreadful Baroness Trumpington – Trumpers -and her husband Alan Barker. Trumpers is an aristocrat of no ability who constantly screws up on a major scale but made it into the Lords and then into Ministerial office as a result of her friendships with the rich and powerful, as well as all the shit that she had on them. Trumpers is about the only survivor of the Cliveden Set – she was a regular there along with the Russian spies, the call girls and the Royal Family (see posts ’95 Glorious Years’ and ‘In Memoriam – Bronwen, Lady Astor’).

Trumpers began her political career in the Cambridge Tory Party and was well established there by the time that Tuppence and Mary began their social climb. Trumpers was involved with Addenbrookes alongside Mary. Trumpers’s husband had been Douglas Hurd’s tutor at Eton and Trumpers was given a Gov’t post as a result of this – a post in which Trumpers cocked up and caused offence. Trumpers herself has been honest enough to admit that she owes her whole political career to her friend Thatcher, who elevated her to the peerage although the only real job that Trumpers had previously held was that of a shop assistant in Peter Jones decades previously – from which she was sacked after colluding with someone who regularly relieved the shop of expensive goodies.

Trumpers involved herself with criminal justice and the welfare of vulnerable people including single mothers, children and psychiatric patients. It was Trumpers who as a junior Health Minister gave Jimmy Savile his job on the management Board of Broadmoor. Keith Laverack, a senior manager of Cambridgeshire Social Services, went to prison for child abuse in 1997 (see post ‘The Mentor’). Trumpers sat on Social Services Committees when she was based in Cambridge. For details of Trumpers’s background and the shameless nepotism and concealing of wrongdoing which resulted in her elevation to high office, see post ’95 Glorious Years!’.

In 1999 the affair that Tuppence had with actress Sally Farmiloe became public and in July 2001 the Indie published allegations that Tuppence and his wife had always had an open marriage.

In 1999 – once the Waterhouse Inquiry had finished hearing evidence from the witnesses who, if they were former kids in care in north Wales were aggressively cross-examined by barristers acting for the people who had abused them and the institutions which spent years concealing the abuse, called liars and trashed in every way possible – Tuppence had been selected by the Conservative Party as candidate for the London Mayoral Election of 2000. Tuppence had the support of Thatcher, Major and Hague. Hague – who when he was Secretary of State for Wales had orchestrated the cover-up which was the Waterhouse Inquiry – described Tuppence as a man of ‘probity and integrity’. Eight Conservative ex-Cabinet Ministers who had been in office during the Thatcher and Major Governments wrote to The Daily Telegraph in support of Tuppence’s candidature.

However, on 21 Nov 1999 the News Of The World published allegations made by Ted Francis, a former friend of Tuppence’s, that Tuppence had committed perjury in his 1987 libel case. Tuppence withdrew his candidature the following day. After the allegations, Tuppence was disowned by his party. Conservative leader Hague explained: ‘This is the end of politics for Jeffrey Archer. I will not tolerate such behaviour in my party.’ On 4 Feb 2000, Tuppence was expelled from the party for five years.

On 9 Feb 2000 the Waterhouse Report was submitted to Paul Murphy, the Secretary of State for Wales, who told everyone that he was ever so grateful that the truth had been revealed and that no cover-up had taken place. Although one hell of a cover-up had taken place and all the witnesses knew this, just to be on the safe side Alun Michael – the First Secretary who had been imposed on Wales by Tony Blair lest anyone chose Rhodri Morgan – resigned immediately that the Report was handed in anyway.

In Sept 2000, Tuppence was charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice during the 1987 libel trial. Ted Francis was charged with perverting the course of justice. Simultaneously, Tuppence starred in a production of his own courtroom play staged at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket.

The perjury trial began on 30 May 2001. Monica Coghlan had died on 27 April 2001. On 26 April 2001, drug addict Gary Day crashed a stolen Jaguar S-type into Coghlan’s Ford Fiesta outside Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Day, 32, had robbed a pharmacy for drugs, then hijacked two cars using a fake pistol: first a Peugeot taxi, which he crashed into a parked Land Rover, then the Jaguar from a motorist who had stopped at the first crash scene to help. Coghlan’s car was catapulted over a wall. She lay in the wreck for an hour and had to be cut out of the wreckage through the car roof. She died from her injuries the next day in a hospital in Leeds, aged 50. Day admitted manslaughter and was sentenced to life imprisonment at Bradford Court by Judge Norman Jones on 6 July 2001. Ben Crosland was Counsel for the defence.

There had been previous allegations that Gary Day had been trying to get himself back in prison. He had convictions going back to 1980 and told police that he had never passed a driving test.

The beauty of a fatal accident caused by a ne’er do well with drug problems and a terrible criminal record is that no-one asks too many questions, even when the fatality is a key witness in a forthcoming high profile trial in which Tuppence will be in the dock and who died after the crash in a hospital in a region in which Jimmy Savile and his mates ran the NHS.

Furthermore if the fatality is someone like Monica who has had a hard life, brushes with the law and can be dismissed as ‘that type of person’, the death is just attributed to her ‘lifestyle’. This was the explanation given for every death of a former child in care or psych patient in north Wales – every one of whom had evidence of very serious wrongdoing by the professional middle classes and sometimes politicians and celebs. What people missed was that once someone fell into the hands of Dafydd and the paedophiles, they were fitted up for offences, hounded out of jobs and often made homeless. When I first encountered Dafydd I was a postgraduate student who had never been in trouble with the law in my life. Within three years Alun Davies referred to ‘your type’ when he spoke to me – well yes, I’d been illegally imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals twice, fitted up for crimes that I hadn’t committed, forced out of my job and someone had made a number of attempts to set fire to my house.

As a result of the activities of the paedophile gang of which Peter Morrison was a member, I gained a great deal of knowledge about my type. And I know exactly why so many of them ended up in prison or dead. And Fatty Davies might be interested to know that it was unrelated to their genes, to their intelligence, lack of formal education or indeed long term mental health problems. It was because they were being killed to stop them talking.

You Fatty were a thick as pigshit NHS clerk from George Thomas’s part of the world who ended up landing jobs that you could not do and should never have been given because you were involved in serious organised crime. I am delighted that you do not categorise me as being of your type, I’ll stick with my type thanks and I’ll carry on blogging about what you did to us.

Three people in my circle who were witness to the criminality in north Wales were killed in car crashes. The first one was my house mate at university who was killed in 1985 whilst she was driving along a country lane in Shropshire. A car travelling on Anne’s side of the road went straight into her. Anne was killed and her former boyfriend Geoff who was a passenger was left brain damaged and paralysed. The man who smashed into Anne escaped with a broken arm. He was never prosecuted and there was no investigation. Anne died after Dr DGE Wood yelled at me to leave north Wales and forget about everything that had happened there. Just before that, Wood told me that he always knew Anne’s car when he saw it because it was a white beetle with transfers of black choughs on the doors. We lived near the same village as Wood.

The second person was killed in 1995 when he was hit by a car near Bethesda when he was walking along a road one evening. This young man was witness to Gwynedd Social Services, the North Wales Police, a Gwynedd County Councillor, the mental health services, the North Wales Housing Association and the Bethesda GPs colluding to conceal a number of cases of child sexual abuse being perpetrated by different members of the same family as well as the removal of a baby from the care of his father who was another witness to the abuse – on the basis of false allegations of abuse. The full details of this story can be read in my post ‘It’s All About Protecting Children’.

The third person was the adult son of a former neighbour of mine near Bethesda who knew the details of the same case. He crashed his lorry one evening – no other vehicles were involved, he was known to be a safe and competent driver and the accident was attributed to heavy rain. The dead man also had knowledge of a people trafficking racket which his own brother had been involved with.

Shortly after Brown’s brother accompanied me on a visit to the North Wales Hospital where as ever Dafydd wasn’t available and no-one knew when he would be, Brown’s brother was hitching outside a motorway service station when a car with young men in whom he did not recognise drove straight at him. He literally jumped into a bush next to him which saved his life. He later emigrated after another few attempts were made on his life.

Not that one has to be dispossessed to find oneself in a fatal car accident about which questions are never answered. It can even happen to a Princess who’s been staying at the Paris Ritz and whose chauffeur-driven car meets a white Fiat Uno whilst travelling through a tunnel at a high speed. The coroner who conducted the final inquest on Di and Dodi to stop all the bellyaching once and for all was Lord Thomas Scott Baker. It was the first inquest that Thomas Scott Baker had ever done – there’s nothing like beginning at the top is there. Scott Baker had spent many enjoyable years working as a judge in the family courts and in 1995 imprisoned Susan Brooke, one of Dafydd’s victims, in a case that raised so many questions that only Dafydd could have been at the centre of it (see posts ‘So Whose Path Had Susan Brooke Crossed?’,’More On The Susan Brooke Case’ and ‘Update On The Cases of Susan Brooke And Sara Thornton’).

Sir Peter Morrison’s sister Dame Mary spent a lifetime at Buck House as a Lady-in-Waiting to HM Lilibet.

Ted Francis claimed that Tuppence had asked him to provide a false alibi for the night that Tuppence was alleged to have been with Monica Coghlan. Angela Peppiatt, Tuppence’s former personal assistant, also claimed Tuppence had fabricated an alibi in the 1987 trial. Peppiatt had kept a diary of Tuppence’s movements, which contradicted evidence given during the 1987 trial. Andrina Colquhoun, Tuppence’s former mistress, confirmed that they had been having an affair in the 1980s, thus contradicting the claim that he and Mary Archer had been ‘happily married’ at the time of the trial.

Tuppence never spoke during the trial, though his wife Mary again gave evidence as she had done during the 1987 trial. On 19 July 2001, Tuppence was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice at the 1987 trial. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment by Mr Justice Potts. Ted Francis was found not guilty. Prominent journalists admitted to having accepted Tuppence’s hospitality after he was convicted.

Those who were named as having attended Tuppence’s parties included Thatch, Major, Tebs, Ken Clarke, Andrew Rawnsley and Simon Hoggart. Guests were described as ‘politicians, editors, political editors’ and others including celebs and archbishops even. No-one admitted to remembering seeing Peter Morrison at Tuppence’s knees-ups, but as Morrison dined regularly with Thatch and her family, I can’t imagine that Tuppence would have forgotten to send him an invitation.

Robin Oakley, the BBC’s Political Editor, went on holiday with Tuppence.

Colquhoun’s and Peppiatt’s evidence at Tuppence’s Old Bailey trial made it quite clear that Tuppence and Mary really did not experience the sort of domestic bliss that Justice Cocklecarrot conjured up in 1987 as he spluttered about green leatherette suits.

Andrina Colquhoun was Tuppence’s mistress for eight years. Colquhoun was raised amid the aristocracy, trained as a fashion photographer, appeared in gossip columns and is said to have attended 300 parties in her debutante year. On the night that Lord Lucan disappeared, Colquhoun was waiting for him at the Clermont Club. They had been due to dine together. In police interviews she insisted they were not lovers; she said she did not want to become involved with a married man with children. This was not something with which she concerned herself when she met Tuppence in 1979, while working for Terence Conran as his PA.

She and Tuppence became lovers and for the next five years she was his regular consort at literary and political engagements, accompanied him abroad on book tours and writing trips and spent much of her time at his riverside penthouse. She furnished his London apartment and removed pictures of Mary from the walls. She is also credited with teaching Tuppence how to dress and conduct himself among the Tory aristocracy.

According to Angela Peppiatt – who I will come to shortly – she was his ‘live-in London person’, one half of the double life that saw him in London Monday to Friday before returning to Mary at Grantchester at weekends. In 1982 Tuppence appointed Colquhoun as his PA in response to rumblings in the gossip columns.

In 1984, when promotion to Deputy Chairman of the Tory Party beckoned, Tuppence dumped Colquhoun, saying he needed to ‘tidy up his life’. He gave her his BMW and number plate, ANY 1 – and then went back on his word to Mary and Thatch by continuing to see her.

In 1999, when news broke of Ted Francis’ false alibi Colquhoun was ‘horrified’ to find herself at the centre of the storm. She was by then married to Robert Waddington whom she met in 1985 while the affair with Tuppence was in full swing.

Ted Francis said his alibi was intended to conceal a Tuppence dinner with Colquhoun from Mary. In his resignation statement Tuppence said he had been with a female friend, ‘whose identity is known to the News of the World’. Andrina was named in all the papers the next day.

At the Old Bailey Andrina said she had been in Greece with Waddington when Tuppence said he was with her.

Angela Peppiatt was Tuppence’s PA before and during the 1987 libel action against the Star. Peppiatt was deeply entwined in the conspiracy that Tuppence hatched to win the case, but for 14 years she kept silent about the lies and deceptions she had carried out on his behalf. When police investigating Ted Francis’ allegations approached her in Dec 1999 she fessed up. Peppiatt was the key prosecution witness.

Peppiatt was hired by Tuppence in 1985. Tuppence was a busy bee with politics and novels, property and theatrical interests, a wife, a mistress and other girlfriends. Peppiatt ran Tuppence’s diary, organised other staff, paid bills from a ‘picnic basket’ of signed chequebooks, wined and dined political and business contacts, bought presents for his girlfriends and lied on his behalf to his mistress and his wife.

She helped Tuppence manufacture trial statements by researching TV schedules so he could pretend he was at home watching TV when he wasn’t, and organised payments to Stacpoole, who was banished to Paris during the 1987 libel action. Peppiatt maintained that: ‘You don’t say no to Jeffrey. You’re either part of his team, or you’re out.’ Tuppence turned to Peppiatt when he decided to forge a diary when he was under pressure to produce one. However, Tuppence was unaware that Peppiatt took copies of the forged documents and wrote a statement detailing her actions. She also kept other documents.

Peppiatt enjoyed a generous salary and expenses and wrote out a £10,000 bonus for herself six months after she forged the diary. She claimed to be ‘deeply ashamed’ in court. Tuppence and his accountants knew what she was doing and tolerated it. But in the winter of 1987 Tuppence stopped her bonus, salary and expenses cheques and accused her of spending money on gifts for herself. Peppiatt quit the job.

Following Tuppence’s conviction, a number of people asked why Mary wasn’t facing perjury charges as well. It can only have been because Justice Cocklecarrot fancied a bit of that and anyway folk like Mary don’t go to prison even if once in a blue moon their husbands do. If Mary had have gone to prison, she would have been in danger of being visited by her mate Trumpers, who was a prison visitor.

Tuppence was initially sent to Belmarsh, a Category A prison, but was moved to Wayland, a Category C prison in Norfolk on 9 Aug 2001. Despite automatically qualifying as a category D prisoner given it was a first conviction and he did not pose serious risk of harm to the public, his status as a category D prisoner was suspended pending a police investigation into his Kurdish charity. Tuppence was transferred to the open prison North Sea Camp in Oct 2001. From there he was let out to work at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln and allowed occasional home visits.

Media reports claimed he had been abusing this privilege by attending lunches with friends, including former Education Secretary Gillian Shephard. In September 2002 Tuppence was transferred to a Category B prison, Lincoln. After three weeks, he was moved to the Category D Hollesley Bay in Suffolk.

During his imprisonment, Tuppence was visited by a number of high-profile friends, including actor Donald Sinden and Barry Humphries aka Dame Edna. On 9 Oct 2012, Donald Sinden celebrated his 89th birthday and his retirement after 30 years as President of the Royal Theatrical Fund with a celebration lunch for 350 guests at the Park Lane Hotel, London. Tuppence conducted the charity auction and a tribute letter from HM Queen Lilibet was read out. Julian Fellowes delivered a speech. Sinden’s funeral in 2014 was attended by Judi Dench, who is Patron of the St James’s Singers, the choir of which Robert Bluglass and his wife are members. Tuppence read the eulogy. Sinden had been a member of the Garrick since 1960.

In Oct 2002, Tuppence repaid the Daily Star the £500,000 damages he had received in 1987, as well as legal costs and interest of £1.3 million.

On 21 July 2003, Tuppence was released on licence from Hollesley Bay after serving half of his sentence. He remained a peer, there being no legal provision through which his title or indeed he could be removed. Tuppence also retained membership of the Lords, which did not then have the power to expel members.

When Tuppence was released on licence, I was on bail for ‘threatening to kill Alun Davies’ after I’d told his secretary that he was a fat idiot. Davies told anyone who would listen that I would be receiving a 7 year prison sentence. It all kicked off in 2002 and the case circulated around the north Wales courts for nearly two years and resulted from numerous mental health staff in north Wales lying in police statements. The case collapsed on the first day of the trial when the prosecution withdrew the allegations and accepted that I had indeed simply told Davies’s secretary that he was a fat idiot. There was no investigation into anyone for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. I was told later that the prosecution changed their mind about putting me on trial after a member of staff at the Hergest Unit came forward with evidence that they had witnessed the plan to frame me and stated that if the trial went ahead they would go public on the abuse of patients at the Hergest Unit.

Huw Daniel, the Presiding judge, was clearly livid when the threats to kill charge was dropped and roared and bellowed his way through the rest of the hearing. Daniel sentenced me to more than 100 hours of community service and issued a legally invalid court order banning me from NHS premises in Gwynedd. He also claimed that Alun Davies and his family were ‘victims’ of mine. I only even knew that Davies had a family because of allegations circulating around north Wales that Davies was securing his relatives positions in the regional NHS through nepotism. For details see posts ‘Interesting Happenings In The Legal System’ and ‘Behind The Scenes Regarding Those Legal Happenings’.

Whilst on community service I met a few more people who had been fitted up and heard much about the wrongdoing of Huw Daniel, as well as about a solicitor in Caernarfon whom it was alleged was abusing children with the full knowledge of the police and the rest of the legal profession (see post ‘Discussions On The Minibus – And A Revealing Letter’).

Years later, I discovered that after the court case, someone had unlawfully amended the PNC and recorded a conviction of ‘violent disorder’ against me. A certificate of indictment had also been forged by someone in Chester Court stating that I had pleaded guilty to this offence. I wrote to the North Wales Police legal services division more than a year ago about this but nothing has been resolved. Although I had no idea that my criminal record had been forged, Martin Jones, the former CEO of the NW Wales NHS Trust knew all about it years ago, but Martin hasn’t told me HOW he knew about it.

In March 1997 there was a trial of a paedophile ring underway at Chester Crown Court. One of those later imprisoned was Keith Laverack, a senior manager for Cambridgeshire Social Services. The Presiding Judge lifted reporting restrictions despite police concerns that this would threaten the rest of the investigation (see post ‘The Mentor’). That judge was Huw Daniel.

As Samantha Fox might have said in 1984, ‘ere what is it with Huw Daniel ‘elping paedophiles?’

Would you like to tell us Huw?

Huw Daniel was the prosecuting Counsel in the 1985 case of the Rev Emyr Owen – a Minister from Tywyn, who was both gay and a bit more honest than this bunch of shites – when Emyr was framed and imprisoned for a series of offences involving the penises of corpses for which there was absolutely no evidence and which would have been a physiological impossibility anyway (see posts ‘The Silence Of The Welsh Lambs’ and ‘Updates, Common Themes And News, May 5 2017′).

After a lifetime of service on the endemically corrupt Chester and Wales Circuit, Huw Daniel was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Gwynedd! In this capacity, Huw Daniel organised a lunch for HM Lilibet when she visited Gwynedd a few years ago. Daniel booked the Management Centre at Bangor University for the occasion and one of my friends was working there at the time. He told me that Daniel was the most ridiculous bully and boar and that he was constantly on the phone blustering at them all. Huw – not only did I hear all about it, but you were a source of entertainment because whilst you were organising HM Lilibet’s lunch, my office in a neighbouring building was decorated with newspaper headlines, satirical photos etc of YOU!!!

After Lilibet’s visit, a number of ignoramuses of that parish complained bitterly that the University authorities had not made more of Lilibet parking her bum in the Management Centre for 60 mins whilst she was on her way to the main event in Llandudno and how disgusting it was that the VC had not participated in the ritual photocall. I wondered if it was at all related to the fact that Gwynedd’s biggest paedophiles’ friend was accompanying her whilst dressed up like General Pinochet. You fucking fool Daniel, half of Bangor University knew about you trying to fit me up on behalf of a paedophile gang.

Let’s hear it for the British judiciary!

Huw Daniel’s father was J.E. Daniel, theologian and preacher, a legend in his own lunchtime, or at least that lunchtime which his son shared with Lilibet. J.E. Daniel became Chairman of Plaid Cymru 1939, holding the position until 1943. In 1946, Daniel was appointed as an inspector of schools, with special responsibility for classics and religious education. Now that would have been an interesting job at a time when a whole host of religious leaders were concealing child abuse in a region with one hell of a problem in that sphere. J.E. Daniel died as the result of a road accident in Flintshire in Feb 1962.

CRASH! Although how that was managed I don’t know, J. E. Daniel would have been about the only man with a car on the road at that time…

J. E. Daniel was an academic at the Bala Theological College. The father of Alun Ffred – former AM for Caernarfon (later renamed Arfon) and at present Chairman of Plaid – and Dafydd Iwan was associated with Bala Theological College. Dafydd Iwan is the former leader of Gwynedd County Council and was President of Plaid, 2003-08. Dafydd Iwan is famed for his folk songs. Offerings include ‘Carlo’, a derogatory ditty about Prince Charles written to celebrate the Investiture in 1969, ‘Saesneg yn Esensial’, a satire on the English language being prioritised above Welsh and ‘Ciosg Talysarn’, a number about the phone box in Talysarn which was reputed to be bugged by MI5. Ever the freedom fighter, Dafydd Iwan also wrote a tribute song to Dr Dafydd Alun Jones!

I have explained in previous posts how it has now been admitted that the security services were concealing the Westminster Paedophile Ring as well as Dr Dafydd Alun Jones’s part in it. All phone boxes were being bugged in north Wales – including the one at Rachub, which was used by me to keep Brown etc updated on what was happening to me and by another resident of that village to repeatedly make representation to Gwynedd Health Authority, to the North Wales Police and to Crimestoppers, about the criminal activities of Dafydd Alun Jones but whose pleas for help were ignored.

On one of the many occasions that I found myself in the cells at Bangor Police Station after having been arrested upon the demands of the paedophile gang, the cells were packed after a near riot had occurred in Bangor. The aggro was because a folk singer had been arrested after the police planted an incendiary device on his property. Initial rumours named Dafydd Iwan as being the man who was fitted up by the British state. It was actually Bryn Fon.

Why would the British state have ever wanted Dafydd Iwan taken out of action?

While in prison, Tuppence wrote a three volume memoir. His prison term also served as inspiration for nine short stories.

In July 2001, shortly after Tuppence was jailed for perjury, Scotland Yard began investigating allegations that millions of pounds had disappeared from his Kurdish charity. In 1991, Tuppence had claimed to have raised £57,042,000. In 1992, the Kurdish Disaster Fund had written to Tuppence complaining: ‘You must be concerned that the Kurdish refugees have seen hardly any of the huge sums raised in the west in their name’. Kurdish groups claimed little more than £250,000 had been received by groups in Iraq.

The British Red Cross commissioned a KPMG audit which showed that no donations were handled by Tuppence and any misappropriation was ‘unlikely’. Thank God for that, or Tuppence and the Red Cross could have been in trouble there. Nonetheless KPMG could find no evidence to support Tuppence’s claims to have raised £31.5 million from overseas governments. The police said that they would launch a ‘preliminary assessment of the facts’ from the audit but were not investigating the Simple Truth fund.

In 2004, the Gov’t of Equatorial Guinea alleged that Tuppence was one of the financiers of the failed 2004 coup against it, citing bank details and telephone records as evidence. In 2009, Tuppence said: ‘I am completely relaxed about it. Mr Mann [Simon Mann, the English mercenary leader of the coup] has made clear that it’s nothing to do with me.’ In 2011, Mann, who was jailed in Equatorial Guinea for his role in leading the failed 2004 coup but was released on humanitarian grounds in 2009, told The Daily Telegraph that his forthcoming book, ‘Cry Havoc’, would reveal ‘the financial involvement of a controversial and internationally famous member of the British House of Lords in the plot, backed up by banking records.’ Mann claimed that documents from the bank accounts in Guernsey of two companies Mann used as vehicles for organising the coup, showed a ‘J H Archer’ paying $135,000 into one of the firms.

Mann was forced to remove some of the text from his book by his publisher, but he did speak to the Guardian about the coup attempt in 2013. Another person involved with that attempted coup was a man known to his friends as Stinker – Sir Mark Thatcher. Stinker had financed the helicopters that were to be used in the overthrow attempt – he was convicted in a South African court, fined $500,000 and given a 4 year suspended prison sentence. Simon Mann maintained that not only did Stinker play a much bigger part in the attempted coup than Stinker ever admitted but Stinker’s mother was right behind the plan. Mann maintains that he went to visit Thatch at her house in Belgravia and she likened the planned coup to the development of the Docklands in the 1980s – everything and everyone had to go. Mann also claimed that Thatch was trying to persuade he and Stinker to support a plan to overthrow Hugo Chavez.

In Feb 2006, on Andrew Marr’s Sunday AM TV programme, Tuppence said that he had no interest in returning to front-line politics and would pursue his writing instead.

Since 2010 Tuppence has written the first draft of each new book at his villa in Majorca.

Between 2005 and 2008, Mary led a pioneering NHS-funded initiative to create patient decision aids for patients with localised prostate cancer (or BPH). She was founder director of Cambridge University Health Partners, 2009–2012 and was Deputy Chairman of ACT (Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust) from 1997-2015. She is currently leading a group to create an online PDA and information/advice for bladder cancer patients in Addenbrooke’s Hospital and across the Anglia Cancer Network.

Mary became Dame Mary in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to the NHS.

In late 2013, Tuppence was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He underwent a successful operation to remove his prostate in Dec 2013 at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and subsequently made a full recovery. In 2010, his wife, Mary, had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and in 2011 Mary had her bladder removed. She appears to have made a full recovery.

Mary is Chair of Imperial College Health Partners’ Expert Advisory Board, and a Trustee of the UK Stem Cell Foundation. In 2014 she joined Hydrodec Group plc as a non-executive Director. She remains a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and is a visiting Professor at Imperial College, London. She has been an honorary fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford since 2013. She serves on the DTI’s energy advisory group and a Committee to ‘promote science’.

Shortly after I wrote my recent blog post about the fraud that I witnessed whilst I was working for the Cancer Research Campaign and how I recently discovered that my work has appeared with Professor Nicola Curtin’s name on it, a lady at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Medical School of whom I had never heard until a few days ago and who most definitely was not part of the project that it is claimed that she worked with me on (see post ‘Oh Lordy, It’s CR UK), Tuppence and Mary appeared in the Mail Online. Tuppence explained how important it is for men to Get Tested and that he had no symptoms of prostate cancer at all but he Got Tested and bugger me, he found that his PSA levels were through the roof, so he’s had his prostate removed and he’s thankful for that.

When I read this my first thought was that Mary had wreaked a Terrible Revenge upon Tuppence – it was Mary who ordered Tuppence to Get Tested and if Tuppence has had his prostate removed he’ll be impotent and doubly incontinent. That’s worth putting up with if you really do have cancer, but Mary Archer will know that there is great concern over the PSA test, because it is throwing up a lot of false positives. It has been admitted that men with benign prostatic hypertrophy – which affects nearly all men as they get older – have been told that they had cancer when they didn’t and have been given needless surgery which has done damage.

But another thought has occurred to me.

Mary is involved with Imperial College. Those people whom I witnessed participating in research fraud and misconduct at Hammersmith Hospital/Royal Postgraduate Medical School/CRC are now leading lights at Imperial College and in cancer research (see post ‘A Cause Close To Our Hearts’). My post ‘I Don’t Believe It!’ described what I believe was a major research fraud committed by the late Dame Julia Polak – who worked at Hammersmith and then at Imperial. Polak was the person with the worst reputation at Hammersmith in terms of dishonesty, ruthlessness and plagiarism. Polak subsequently became famous as a result of what I believe was a massive fraud and established a huge charity on the basis of it all.

Mary is leading prostate cancer initiatives.

Tuppence has lied and lied throughout his career – he went to prison because he lied in court. It was later demonstrated that Mary knew that Tuppence was lying when she backed him up and people were curious as to how Mary had avoided a charge of perjury herself. Tuppence and Mary will say pretty much anything if they will benefit from it.

Has Tuppence REALLY had his prostate removed? Has Mary even had her bladder removed as claimed? They both seem to have made miraculous recoveries, as did dear old Dame Julia. I think more questions should be asked about Tuppence and Mary’s miracle cures and their outstanding NHS treatment at a time when the NHS was demonstrated to be a very flawed beast – particularly as the medical miracles were such good adverts for Mary’s career.

Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Mary might not be clad in a green leatherette suit, but it was the lady in green leatherette who was telling the truth in 1987.

CRASH! There’s one problem solved.

BBC News Online has recently reported on the Australian migrant children and how there ‘demands for justice’ for them and requests that they be paid compensation. Last century large numbers of disadvantaged kids from the UK – frequently from inner London, but from other places as well – were removed from their families and sent to Australia, often simply because they were in serious poverty. Their parents were told of the wonderful new life that their children would have in Australia – this was still happening in the 1970s, but people stress that it happened ‘in the 1950s’. Numerous kids were abused sexually and physically in their new ‘homes’ in Australia. The authorities in the UK knew that this was happening but kept a firm lid on it until very recently. Once the abusers had all died. Now what does that remind me of?

‘Justice and compensation for the victims.’ How can there be justice when the crimes have been committed and were committed with the knowledge of the British state? Compensation? Most of the folk involved are now elderly. What are they supposed to spend the compensation on – a good funeral, Kray-like with posh horses whose manes have been plaited pulling a grand coach containing the coffin?

Professor Alex Jay is determined to get to the truth. So that’s why Dame Mary is sitting on a Gov’t Committee ‘promoting science’, why my friends are dead and why I have a forged criminal record which no-one will investigate.

Now that I have blogged even more about the way in which people in Westminster destroyed Wales, I’ll just repeat something that Johnny Rotten said as he appeared on stage at the Brixton Academy back in the 1970s:

‘Hello London – how the fuck are you?’

Don’t even tempt me to take a leaf out of the book of Sid Vicious a la that film clip of him gunning down the crowd and leaving behind screaming chaos as he departed…

The Guardian online edition has just published the obituary of Bronwen Astor, the third wife of Bill Astor aka William Waldorf, 3rd Viscount Astor – Bronwen died at the age of 87 on Dec 28.

Bronwen married Bill Astor in 1960 and only three years later found herself at the centre of the Profumo Affair, the scandal which brought down Harold Macmillan in Oct 1963. Bronwen and the Astors considered that they suffered very badly as a result of the Profumo Affair – they complained that their reputations had been unfairly tarnished and that friends had deserted them. In 2001 Peter Stanford wrote a biography of Bronwen with which she readily co-operated by making papers and other information available. Bronwen felt that Stanford’s biography had gone some way to salvaging her reputation and after its publication she felt able to move back to London to live among those who had previously coldshouldered her. There were however two other people who fared rather more badly than Bronwen or the Astors, as we shall see.

Bronwen was born Janet Bronwen Alun Pugh in London, the third daughter of the Welsh circuit judge Sir Alun Pugh. Although she was raised in Hampstead, Bronwen went to Dr Williams School in Dolgellau, north Wales, as a boarder. After leaving school she trained to be a teacher at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Bronwen didn’t actually want to teach and she took up modelling work instead. In 1954 she worked for a while as a BBC TV presenter and then went to Paris where she became a high profile catwalk model. Bronwen retired from the catwalk after she married Bill Astor and dedicated herself to running Cliveden, Astor’s country seat. Bill Astor was Tory MP for Fulham East, 1935-45. He served as a naval intelligence officer during WWII and made many contacts. In 1951 Astor was elected as the Tory MP for High Wycombe. He relinquished his seat when he inherited his father’s title ten months later.

Cliveden was the centre of a group of aristos known as the Cliveden set – which included Baroness Jean Trumpington – who enjoyed weekend gatherings there. Trumpers’s friend Sally Norton was Bill Astor’s first wife. Cliveden was to become notorious as a result of a party that was held there on the weekend of 8-9 July 1961. It was at this party that one of the guests, 19 year old Christine Keeler, met another guest, John aka Jack Profumo, who was the Minister for War in Harold Macmillan’s Cabinet. Jack Profumo was very keen on Christine and they started an affair.

Christine was not one of the aristocratic friends of Bill Astor. She had experienced a very difficult life and whilst in her mid-teens had become involved with various unpleasant people, including a violent pimp and a gangster associated with London’s jazz scene, Johnny Edgecombe. Christine was also friendly with someone who treated her rather better than Edgecombe did, a society osteopath and portrait artist, Stephen Ward. Ward had met Christine in 1959 when she was 17 and working as a dancer in Soho – her bit of the dancing consisted of her standing on the stage topless but motionless whilst the other dancers did the dancing. Christine moved in with Stephen Ward – his house was in Wimpole Mews – and she also spent time with him at Spring Cottage, a house that Ward rented on the Cliveden estate. Ward was a good friend of Bill Astor and Ward and his guests at Spring Cottage would attend the bashes that Astor was holding at the main house. Another person shared Ward’s house with Christine and him – Christine’s friend Mandy Rice-Davies.

Stephen Ward was the son of an English vicar, who someone responsible for adding information to his wiki entry tells us was a ‘lazy and regular underachiever’ at school. Such was Ward’s underachieving that he had no other options for a career but osteopathy – which the lazy underachiever was very good at. The lazy underachiever qualified as an osteopath in the US and then in 1944 was posted to India with the Army, where he was allowed to continue with his osteopathy – Mahatma Ghandi was one of his patients. Whilst in India Ward had a ‘nervous collapse’ and was hospitalised. He returned to England in 1945 and was discharged from the Army on the grounds of disability.

Ward then worked at the Osteopathic Association Clinic at Dorset Square in London, where one of his patients was Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, who was sufficiently impressed by the lazy underachiever to recommend him to Churchill. So many other people were wowed by the lazy underachiever that word spread among the members of High Society and Ward opened his own clinic in Cavendish Square, off Harley Street. Ward had become friendly with socialite Arthur Ferrier who invited Ward to his parties. At these gatherings Ward met other lazy underachievers, including Prince Philip of Greece, who at that point was a junior officer in the Navy and hadn’t yet married into the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family of German origin which allowed him to hurl racist insults at Johnny Foreigner with impunity. One of Ward’s patients was Bill Astor. They became good friends and in 1956 Astor let Spring Cottage to Ward at a nominal rent.

History tells us that Ward introduced the ‘shy Bill Astor’ into Ward’s world of girls and parties . Bill Astor was so shy that he’d managed to get married a couple of times and procreate by the time that he married Bronwen in 1960. I don’t think that the parties at Cliveden were solely Ward’s idea either.

Ward’s laziness and underachieving also led to him studying at the Slade and subsequently establishing a reputation as a painter of portraits. In 1960 he was commissioned by the Illustrated London News to paint a series of portraits including those of Prince Philip and Princess Margaret. Ward wanted to visit the Soviet Union to paint the Soviet leaders, so the editor of the Daily Telegraph Sir Colin Coote arranged for Ward to be introduced to Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian naval attache at the Soviet Embassy. Ward became good friends with Ivanov – who was known to the British security services as a KGB agent. Ward was used by the Foreign Office in unofficial diplomacy – as a backchannel through Ivanov to the Soviet Union – at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Christine Keeler began a relationship with Iavanov.

The security services wanted Ivanov to defect and had planned to use Christine as a honey trap. However that plan was complicated after she met Profumo and begun an affair with him as well – Ward had reported to MI5 that they had met at the party. Christine and Profumo definitely had an affair but no-one is quite sure how long for, as so many people told so many lies. It is known that they regularly met at Ward’s house in Wimpole Mews. Ward had joked to Christine about her participating in pillow talk with Profumo regarding the possibility of West Germany being provided with nuclear warheads, but MI5 didn’t take this seriously. However the story regarding the possibility of a security breach got out.

On 9 Aug 1961 Profumo was warned of the dangers of his friendships with Ward’s group by Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook, who had been told by Sir Roger Hollis DG of MI5 that MI5 were unsure of Ward’s dependability.

Although there were plenty of rumours circulating about Christine’s relationship with Profumo, nothing emerged in the press until Johnny Edgecombe got particularly nasty. Christine – who was described as Edgecombe’s ‘lover’ but seems to have fallen more into the category of a call-girl/battered girlfriend of his – was assaulted by a male acquaintance of both of them. Edgecombe slashed him with a knife causing considerable injury, was arrested and subsequently appeared at the Old Bailey in March 1963. Christine was called as a witness but was so frightened of Edgecombe that she failed to materialise in Court. She had good reason to be frightened – three months previously Edgeware had gone looking for her and had fired a few shots into Ward’s door for good measure.

After Christine’s non-appearance at the Old Bailey, there was a hoo hah about the ‘missing witness’ and Christine went public on what had been going on re Profumo and her and tried to sell her story to the press. No-one dared publish anything but the level of rumour was such that on 21 March after Edgecombe’s trial Private Eye published a thinly disguised account replacing the names of the people involved with ‘Dr Spook’, ‘Miss Gaye Funloving’, ‘Mr James Montesi’ and ‘Vladimir Bolokhov’.

On 22 March 1963 Profumo made a statement to the House denying any ‘impropriety’ with Christine. Stephen Ward initially supported Profumo’s story but was so aggressively targeted by the police and threatened with arrest for living off immoral earnings on the grounds that Christine and Mandy were prostitutes that he revealed all to Profumo’s political masters and to the press. Profumo fessed up and resigned from Parliament. The police had interviewed more than 100 people as part of their investigation into Ward and Mandy Rice-Davies was arrested for a driving licence offence and remanded in Holloway until she agreed to testify against him. Two days after Profumo resigned, among growing rumours of many more sex scandals in high places including allegations that senior civil servants were involved in unacceptable sexual practices and that Prince Philip was somehow linked to the Profumo Affair, Ward was arrested and charged with living off immoral earnings and procuring.

Ward’s trial in July 1963 caused a sensation. The famous bit was Mandy Rice-Davies’s response after being told that Bill Astor had denied having sex with her – she replied ‘well he would wouldn’t he’. Mandy was sixteen when she lived it up and slept with the Cliveden set. There was a paucity of evidence against Ward. Mandy and Christine had contributed towards household expenses whilst they had lived with him and had repaid money that he’d lent them. Furthermore Ward had a very good income from his osteopathy and painting. Most charges against him were dismissed, but Ward was convicted on two counts of living off immoral earnings.

Ward was made a complete scapegoat because a bunch of aristos and politicians who were mates with the Royal Family had been caught out. His character was completely trashed, first at the committal proceedings on 28 June 1963 at Marylebone Magistrates Court and then again at his Old Bailey trial. None of the rich very well-connected people who had been close friends with Ward for years spoke up for him and MI5 didn’t reveal that they had been using him. Towards the end of the trial there was evidence available from another case at the Court of Appeal that Christine had perjured herself in that case and therefore wasn’t a sound witness – she was the chief prosecution witness at Ward’s trial. The presiding judge at Ward’s trial Sir Archie Marshall – who had been active in the Liberal Party since he had been at Cambridge and had previously stood for election as a Liberal candidate on a number of occasions – did not make this evidence known to the jury. The prosecution barrister was Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who had become notorious three years previously at the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, when he had questioned whether someone would want their ‘wife or servants’ to read the book. Griffith-Jones ripped Ward apart and stated in Court that Ward represented the ‘very depths of lechery and depravity’.

On 30 July Archie Marshall began his summing up. He made such an attack on Ward that Ward overdosed on barbiturates and was taken to hospital where he died three days later. His memorial service was held in the chapel at St Stephen’s Hospital, so I presume that is where he died.

Ward was the man who was put on trial but the police had investigated Bill Astor as well and had threatened to charge him with brothel keeping, after they discovered that he had written a cheque to pay the rent on a flat of Christine’s and Mandy’s.

Another judge knew a great deal about what did or didn’t go on at Cliveden but he didn’t appear at the Old Bailey – Sir Alun Pugh, Bill Astor’s father-in-law. Jeremy Lewis’s book ‘David Astor’ describes how before Ward’s trial Alun Pugh met with Bill Astor, David Astor, David and Bill’s brother Jakie and Bill Astor’s lawyer to discuss whether Bill was going to give evidence. Sir Aun remembered that ‘David was breathing fire and talked about the fight for the honour of the Astor family’ and was ‘begging Bill to go into the witness box’. Bill was advised against this by his ‘awful lawyer’.

The Astor family owned the Observer and David was the editor. David went to Eton and then Balliol, whereas both Bill and Jakie went to Eton and then New College, Oxford. Jakie was the Tory MP for Plymouth Sutton, 1951-59. Nancy Astor, the mother of Bill, David and Jakie, had been the Tory MP for Plymouth Sutton, 1919-45. Nancy had a son from her first marriage, Bobby Shaw, who was quite troubled. He had problems with alcohol and in 1931 he was arrested for homosexual offences. Many years later, after his mother’s death, Bobby killed himself. Nancy Astor’s political views were a bit odd. She was an appeaser who met Nazi officials on a number of occasions and also had a problem with Jewish people and Catholics – such that she dictated that they should not be employed by the Observer, a policy which was still being followed in the 1960s. She took an interest in juvenile justice and was involved in the passing of legislation regarding sex offences against young people.

David Astor was viewed as a socially liberal compassionate man supportive of a number of radical causes. When he was young he had a breakdown and was analysed by Anna Freud. David was very friendly with George Orwell, who was employed by the Observer. David and George Orwell are buried next to each other – David purchased the two burial plots for that purpose. David Astor was one of the founders of Amnesty International in 1961 and was also very supportive of the ANC from the mid-60s. Nelson Mandela publicly paid tribute to David Astor for his support.

However there are a few interesting things tucked away regarding David in Jeremy Lewis’s book. Although the Observer condemned Profumo for lying to the House, David was obviously able to wield considerable control over what it published about the Profumo Affair. Jeremy Lewis’s biography of David Astor records how at the time of Stephen Ward’s trial David was on holiday on Jura and wrote to Bill Astor telling him that he wished that he could control what the Observer was going to say about the trial. Yet David will have known the date of the trial weeks in advance – he didn’t HAVE to go on holiday to Jura at that time. David had a friend and an advisor who was notoriously effective at assisting people in high places who were in trouble – Lord Arnold Goodman. Goodman was Harold Wilson’s solicitor and also helped Jeremy Thorpe out when he was charged with conspiring to murder Norman Scott (see post ‘My How Things Haven’t Changed’). David Astor is one of the many people who maintained that Ward was ‘the victim of an historic injustice’. Astor was on record as saying that the build up of hostility towards Ward before the trial was a ‘nightmare’ and that he regrets that he didn’t say anything about it. Ah well he just had to go on that holiday to Jura when he had absolutely no influence at all over what the paper that his family owned and which he edited was going to publish about the very hot water in which his older brother had landed.

George Orwell wasn’t the only employee of the Observer who’s name became part of British history. The Observer also employed Kim Philby. After Burgess and Maclean defected, Kim Philby was under suspicion of being the Third Man and was grilled by MI5. He resigned from the service. Malcolm Muggeridge, Philby’s war time colleague from MI6, suggested that Philby should try and bag a job on the Observer. Philby wrote to David Astor in Feb 1952 and made a good impression on Astor and Philip Toynbee. Philby subsequently filed a number of reports for the Observer. Two years later in 1955 Philby was officially cleared in the House of the accusation that he was the Third Man. MI6 re-employed him and posted him to Beirut, under the cover of working for the Observer as their middle east correspondent. In 1963 Philby defected to Russia. Ted Heath later told the House that Philby had been the Third Man and had been working for the Soviets. Astor later denied knowing that Philby was working for MI6, although the security services maintain that Astor did know.

The Observer came in for a lot of flak for employing Kim Philby.

John Pringle maintained that thanks to David Astor, ‘the Observer behaved with generosity and restraint’, which saved the reputation of Cliveden. Bronwen stated that she was ‘very touched’ by a letter that she’d received from David. David also wrote to Profumo, acknowledging that Profumo blamed Bill Astor for his troubles and that he found it ‘difficult to entirely forgive Bill’, but urged him to visit Bill who was at the time in the Middlesex Hospital.

The Observer was ailing in the 1960s. The Sunday Times’s circulation exceeded that of the Observer – the Sunday Times even managed to employ Lord Snowdon as their photographer – and the launch of the Sunday Telegraph in 1961 provided further competition for the Observer. David Astor, Tristan Jones the MD of the Observer and the Trustees were working flat out to keep the newspaper afloat. Tristan Jones was the son of Tom Jones, the President of Aberystwyth University, 1944-54. Scores of the lawyers and judges who concealed the criminality associated with the Top Doctors and the paedophile gang in north Wales trained at Aberystwyth. Tristan Jones’s sister was Baroness Eirene White, who for many years was the Labour MP for Flintshire, who did a great deal to conceal the criminality as well (see post ‘A Bit More Paleontology’).

After Stephen Ward’s trial the Master of the Rolls Lord Denning was appointed by the Gov’t to investigate all the rumours that emanated from the Profumo Affair. Denning’s Report was published in Sept 1963. He maintained that there had been no security leaks, no evidence to link members of the Gov’t with the associated scandals and blamed the ‘utterly immoral Ward’ for absolutely everything. After Macmillan resigned ‘for health reasons’, his successor Lord Home resigned his peerage and became Sir Alec Douglas Home. In Oct 1964 Labour won the General Election and Harold Wilson became Prime Minister.

It was John Hunt who in his capacity as Cabinet Secretary to Harold Wilson’s Gov’t advised Wilson to appoint Sir Kenneth Stowe as the Principal Private Secretary to the PM. John Hunt – who served as Cabinet Secretary, 1973-79 ie. to the Gov’ts of Heath, Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher – had been Sir Norman Brook’s Private Secretary, 1956-58 – the Norman Brook who had warned Profumo about Stephen Ward’s crowd. John Hunt and Kenneth Stowe became incredibly powerful people and Stowe spent many enjoyable years as the Principal Private Secretary to Wilson and Callaghan and then as the mandarin who concealed all the crap in the NHS, including the activities of the lobotomist Gwynne Williams, Dr Dafydd Alun Jones and the paedophile ring (see post ‘Additional Security Measures’) In 1989 Sir Kenneth Stowe published a book called ‘On Caring for the National Health’. Stowe certainly cared for the health of society’s elites and for the Top Doctors who served them but unfortunately not for patients who were the targets of the Top Doctors who were involved in serious crime. Gwynne the lobotomist and facilitator of the paedophile ring became Medical Superintendent of the North Wales Hospital Denbigh in 1963. Dafydd followed hot on his heels. Dafydd and Gwynne also were involved in the sexual exploitation of young attractive female patients who like Christine Keeler had come from difficult backgrounds and had no-one to look out for them. Christine Keeler had been in the hands of the welfare agencies herself as a teenager.

The account written of the Profumo Affair by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril maintains that a former MI6 operative admitted that Stephen Ward had been murdered by an MI6 agent, because of the potential for him to cause embarrassment to the Gov’t and the Royal Family. Jean Trumpington mentions in her biography ‘Coming Up Trumps’ that when HM the Queen visited Cliveden, the less reputable guests would be hidden (see post ’95 Glorious Years!’). The alleged method of killing Steven Ward was to encourage him to take increasing doses of barbiturates until a fatal dose had been ingested. Which would be a very easy thing to achieve if you were, for example, a Top Doctor treating a very distressed Stephen Ward who was being fitted up in Court. In fact that is exactly what very nearly happened to me at the hands of the mental health services in north Wales (see post ‘An Attempt To Frame Me – Witnessed’).

In 1982 Ward’s MI5 role whilst he was friendly with Ivanov was confirmed by the Sunday Times, who located his former contact.

Christine Keeler died recently and maintained to the end that the truth about the Profumo Affair had never ever been revealed. Although in one of her accounts Keeler stated that Ward was a spy she always maintained that he was a gentleman and that their relationship had never been sexual . Mandy Rice-Davies weathered the Profumo Affair rather better than Christine did and became a successful businesswoman. Christine went to prison for perjury – but not at Stephen Ward’s trial – and spent most of the rest of her life being called a slapper.

Jack Profumo rehabilitated himself completely through Good Works with the disadvantaged and dispossessed at Toynbee Hall in the East End. Toynbee Hall has featured previously on this blog. Some of those involved with Toynbee Hall have concealed the sexual abuse and exploitation of disadvantaged young people.

Bronwen was frozen out of high society post-Profumo and was miffed to be accused of being another one of Ward’s girls who was trained to bag a rich husband. Bronwen maintained that she only met Ward after her marriage to Bill Astor and took an ‘instant dislike’ to him. As of course did everyone else once the scandal became public – after they’d been mates with him for years, invited him to their knees-ups, had their portraits painted and had their muscles and bones manipulated by him. And of course asked him to supply them with girls for their parties.

In 1966 Bill Astor died in the Bahamas.

Bronwen moved from Cliveden and founded an ecumenical religious community at Tuesley Manor in Godalming in Surrey. The community collapsed in 1974 – in 1986 Bronwen qualified as a psychotherapist and ran a practice for over 20 years. She was regarded as something of an authority on the link between religious experiences and the mind and Chaired the Alester Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford – which is now located at Trinity St David’s University in Wales.

Those who were involved with Cliveden are nearly all dead now. So perhaps Trumpers would like to let us know exactly who did what because I don’t suppose that the Queen and Prince Philip are going to be giving any interviews about their time at parties with the Cliveden set.

On 11 June 1986 Olivia Channon, the daughter of Paul Channon, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, was found dead in the rooms of Count Gottfried von Bismarck at Christ Church College, Oxford University. von Bismarck had thrown a post-exams drugs and drink binge the night before for his friends – Olivia had passed out unconscious on von Bismarck’s bed at approx 2-30 am. Her body was found five hours later, in a pool of her own vomit – close to Olivia’s body was a spoon and silver foil with traces of heroin on it. Some of the first newspaper reports about Olivia’s death stated that preliminary forensic tests had shown that she had died from a cardiac arrest after taking huge quantities of champagne, vodka and heroin, other reports stated that a preliminary post-mortem revealed that she had choked on her own vomit. The circumstances of Olivia’s death did not become any clearer over the following weeks or indeed months.

The other revellers – there were eight people at the party – all stated that they had left Olivia alone, crashed out on von Bismark’s bed, in the early hours whilst they went to other events. The police arrested and charged some of those at the party. Olivia’s friend Rosie Johnston- whom she had known from childhood – was charged with supplying Olivia with heroin. Rosie had purchased the drugs in London for Olivia. Rosie and Olivia shared a house in Oxford – Olivia owned the house, she was a member of the Guinness family and was in receipt of a generous trust fund. Unlike everyone else involved, Rosie wasn’t a student at Oxford University. She had actually been studying for a degree with London University, but had transferred to Manchester College – which was part of London University but located in Oxford – because she wanted to be near to her friends. Nicholas Vincent, who discovered Olivia’s body, was charged with the possession of amphetamines. Gottfried von Bismark was charged with possession. Paul Dunstan an ‘unemployed musician’ was charged with supplying heroin. Rosie’s boyfriend – Olivia’s cousin – Sebastian Guinness was charged with possession of cocaine.

After Olivia’s body was found the police began an investigation into the route by which drugs were being trafficked from London to serve the Oxford University market and stated that they were interested in one particular unnamed dealer based in London.

At Olivia’s inquest Nicholas Vincent admitted that he’d lied to the police. He had initially denied that he had been asleep on the bed beside Olivia when she died, but told the inquest that he ‘could not cope with the fact of having slept with Olivia beside me all night’. Vincent was not a undergrad like Olivia and Rosie – he was a post-grad who was working as a part-time tutor and had been giving extra tuition to Olivia. Vincent maintained that he had warned Olivia about smoking heroin.

After Olivia’s death, Vincent left the UK, severed all ties with his contemporaries at Oxford and was last heard of years ago teaching English in Gstaad in Switzerland.

Someone else left the UK after Olivia’s death as well – von Bismarck, although he claimed that he didn’t know that Olivia was using heroin. Gottfried left Oxford within hours – he was ‘recalled’ to the family seat in Germany by his father Prince Ferdinand and rapidly checked into a private clinic to be treated for alcoholism. Gottfried’s departure was so rapid that a family servant was dispatched to Oxford to pay his pub, restaurant and tailors bills. Gottfried subsequently completed his studies in Germany, although he did return to the UK, both to appear at Oxford Magistrates Court and some years later, to live and work. At Oxford Magistrates Court von Bismark was fined the grand total of £80 for the possession of cocaine. Gottfried will not have made a case to the magistrates of being on a low income. His great-great-grandfather was Prince Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian ‘Iron Chancellor’, his father was Prince Ferdinand von Bismarck and the family seat is a castle. The family also owns a good deal more than their castle. Gottfried’s younger sister Vanessa later became a PR agent in the US and his older brother Carl-Eduard became an MP in the German Bundestag.

Gottfried was defended by Robin Grey QC when he appeared before the Oxford Magistrates for the possession of drugs. Grey stated that Olivia’s death was ‘going to be a shadow’ over von Bismark’s head ‘probably for the rest of his life’.

Sebastian Guinness and Paul Dunstan were sentenced in Dec 1986 by Sir Philip Otton. Guinness was imprisoned for four months and Paul Dunstan was imprisoned for four years for supplying heroin to Olivia. Otton commented at the trial that rich privileged people cannot expect to receive lighter sentences and his sentencing would demonstrate this. Which is why the ‘unemployed musician’ received four years in jail and their heir to the Guinness fortune received four months. Whereas Count von Bismark got away with an £80 fine in the Magistrates Court. I haven’t come across many cases involving Sir Philip Otton – but I do know that he was the judge who rejected Mary Wynch’s first appeal. Otton was over-ruled by the Master of the Rolls (see post ‘ The Lawyers And Judges Involved In Mary Wynch’s Case’).

An additional twist to Olivia’s death emerged when three journalists found a three page torn up suicide note from Olivia addressed to Rosie in the dustbin of the house that the young women shared. There were references in the note to Olivia being depressed and distraught over her break up with a man to whom she referred as ‘Jeremy Hippy’. It transpired that Jeremy Hippy was Thomas Jeremy Barnes, a former Oxford student who ran a mobile disco in Verbier, Switzerland. After the existence of the suicide note became public, Paul Channon issued a statement through his lawyer maintaining that Olivia had written the note months ago, that she and Jeremy Hippy were reconciled and that he knew that she hadn’t committed suicide because if she had been planning to do that she would have contacted Channon to talk about her will. Obviously a warm and caring family the Channons. I can find no other references to Jeremy Hippy except in the context of the mention of his name in the suicide note, so presumably he kept a low profile in Switzerland with the mobile disco as he will not have needed to have been concerned with the writing of any will.

Rosie Johnston was dealt with rather more harshly than von Bismarck, but still didn’t suffer too much. She was sentenced to nine months imprisonment and served six months. She briefly saw the inside of Holloway but was then transferred to Bullwood Hall and East Sutton Park Open Prison. In 1989 Rosie wrote a prison memoir called ‘Inside Out’. Because by that time I had been subject to a number of attempts by the paedophiles’ friends in north Wales to frame me for serious offences, I took quite a big interest in matters concerning criminal justice and I read Rosie’s book. Rosie was quite laid back about prison – she noted that Holloway held a lot of seriously mentally ill women who spent their days injuring themselves and frequently succeeded in killing themselves despite being on the euphemistically named ‘hospital wing’. The hospital wing in Holloway was of course known as the muppet house because even the other prisoners noticed that the prisoners on that wing really were in a bad way and should not have been in a prison. Rosie wrote about hearing the muppets screaming in distress 24 hours a day and she also noticed how many women in Holloway were serving sentences for drugs offences, including overseas citizens who had been coerced into working as drug mules by pimps or gangsters and were serving very long sentences for importing drugs. Rosie described Bullwood Hall as being like a particularly awful girl’s boarding school, but because she had been to such an establishment herself she didn’t find it too unbearable.

Rosie mentioned in her book that she arrived at Holloway wearing no knickers because she forgot to put them on and that the other prisoners were puzzled as to why someone as posh as Rosie was so unkempt, or in their words ‘dirty’. Now as someone who has had to prepare myself for a possible prison sentence on a few occasions as a stream of Angels and Top Doctors have perjured themselves, I can testify that it is most unlikely that one would forget one’s undies in those circumstances. If you know that you may well be banged up for God knows how long with no opportunities to get your hands on the essentials, things like toothbrushes, undies etc do spring to mind. Unless of course you are someone with one hell of a drug problem and are barely compus mentis in court, although there was no suggestion of that in any media reports.

Rosie Johnston’s mother is a member of the publishing family the Chancellors. At the time of Olivia’s death Rosie’s uncle Alexander Chancellor was Deputy Editor of The Sunday Telegraph and had just spent several years as Editor of The Spectator. Both publications were very supportive of Thatcher’s Gov’t.

When her book was published Rosie Johnston indicated that she wanted to work in prison reform, but I note that did not happen.

Someone else’s name cropped up in connection with Olivia’s death who supported Paul Channon’s claims that Olivia didn’t kill herself – Viscount Charles Althorp aka Champagne Charlie, the Princess of Wales’s brother. Champagne Charlie maintained that he had phoned Olivia hours before her death and she was fine and happy.

In the wake of Olivia’s death there was many acres of newsprint dedicated to the hedonistic lifestyle being pursued by some Oxford students. One article I remember reading in I think the New Statesman had been written by a young journo who had mates at Oxford. This journo had been reassured that although a great deal of drinking and drug taking was happening, one just had to ensure that one’s mates put one’s body in the appropriate position to prevent one choking on one’s vomit if one passed out. A medical student called Hilary was good enough to tell the New Statesman exactly what needed to be done in order to avoid death when rat arsed. Some press articles were rude enough to suggest that Oxford was stuffed full of rich drug taking wasters from dysfunctional families who had bagged their places through their connections rather than their ability.

Gottfried at least was certainly a very rich man with a hectic lifestyle. He drank very heavily throughout the night and kept himself awake during the day by using amphetamines. He was a member of the Piers Gaveston Society, which had originally been established as a gays only club. Members had an interest in rubber and whips and were required to camp it up. Gottfried took his membership seriously – he regularly appeared in fishnet stockings or lederhosen and lipstick. Although von Bismarck was a member of the Bullingdon Club as well and spent many happy hours smashing up restaurants, he found life in Oxford somewhat dull and spent much time in London doing some rather more serious partying. Gottfried did host some memorable bashes in Oxford though. At one Bavarian themed party he hung two severed pigs heads over the tables to enable the pigs blood to drip onto the food. Sebastian Shakespeare – who is now a journalist – was a good mate of Gottfried’s and was in attendance on that occasion.

Other friends of von Bismarck’s included Champagne Charlie, Lady Antonia Fraser’s son Damien and Princess Charlotte of Luxembourg. Fellow members of the Bullingdon Club included Darius Guppy – who was also in the Piers Gaveston Society. Guppy was best man at Champagne Charlie’s first wedding and Champagne Charlie was best man at Guppy’s nuptials.

Darius Guppy is of course best known for a 1993 insurance fraud which involved him and his business partner Benedict Marsh faking a jewellry robbery and then claiming £1.8 million from the insurers. In Feb 1993 Guppy was sentenced to five years imprisonment for conspiracy involving fraud, robbery and false accounting. In 1993 Guppy also pleaded guilty to three separate charges concerning illegal VAT claims on gold bullion smuggled into India between Oct 1989-July 1990. Since his conviction Guppy has written some bizarre pompous articles explaining how trying to swindle £1.8 million out of someone else was his revenge on Lloyds of London for their alleged wrongdoing in relation to his family. His mates like Boris Johnson – who was at Eton and then Oxford with Guppy and was a fellow member of the Bullingdon Club – have banged on about Guppy being a man of such honour that he had to demand satisfaction. Do you know Boris, a lot of people have done some very nasty things to me, but I’ve never staged an armed robbery in order to extract nearly two million quid out of them. I’ve ended up writing this blog instead.

Guppy obviously felt that he could rely on Boris to defend his corner because in 1990 when Boris was working as a journalist on the Daily Telegraph, Boris received a phone call asking him if he could provide the home address of News of the World journalist Stuart Collier, who was investigating Guppy – Guppy wanted to have Collier beaten up. A tape of the conversation was leaked to the press in 1995.

Another person who was in the Bullingdon Club with this lot was someone called David Cameron. This bunch of indulged dickwits really were the heirs to Thatcher. Before the unfortunate business of Olivia Channon, the Daily Mail and similar outlets used to constantly run features on Champagne Charlie et al drooling over how grand and important their parents were. I remember reading one article about ‘the Cabinet Ministers beautiful daughters’ – one of the beautiful daughters, Mary Parkinson, fruit of Cecil’s loins, had rather let the side down by getting involved in drugs and prostitution – the principal star of this feature was one Annabel Heseltine, who I think was at Durham rather than Oxford. Anyway Annabel’s mates were interviewed explaining that ‘she was always falling out of her clothes’ – a bit like Cecil then – and getting plastered on champers. Many years later, but I think before Cameron became PM, old father Heseltine was waxing lyrical in a broadsheet about the fine new generation of Tories that had been bred when he revealed that he had tripped over David Cameron in a heap of bodies after Annabel had held a piss up. And do you know, Heseltine was most impwessed when he actually spoke to Dave and he wealised that he was looking at a future Pwime Minister.

Dave – can you ask your mates how Olivia died? Furthermore, what with your mother sitting on the Oxford Magistrates bench, can you perhaps explain how the fuck Count von Bismarck got away with an £80 fine when a corpse full of heroin was discovered in his room? I heard you on the radio that time when you became over excited and starting shouting about how what pumps you up is people taking a chance and ‘doing the right thing’. Loading your mates up with Class A drugs, fleeing when they die and telling a pack of lies to the police isn’t really doing the right thing is it Dave? Perhaps you could include a chapter about it all in the memoirs that you’re writing in your shepherd’s hut.

Although Robin Grey QC had explained to the Oxford Magistrates – perhaps even to Dave’s mum herself – how Olivia’s death would be forever with von Bismarck, it didn’t hold the Count back for long. After completing his studies in Germany, von Bismarck spent some time in Los Angeles and then worked as an executive for Kevin Maxwell’s company Telemonde. von Bismarck’s role was to raise capital from the stockmarket – unfortunately Telemonde collapsed in 2002 with debts of £105 million. von Bismarck then spent some time working in London promoting holidays in Uzbekistan. von Bismarck was promoting the delights of the Uzbek regime to tourists just after Jack Straw, in his capacity as Home Secretary, had ordered the withdrawal and interrogation of the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. What had Craig Murray done to upset Jack Straw? Murray had raised concerns over human rights abuses in Uzbekistan – human rights abuses which included boiling people alive. After advertising the delights of Uzbekistan, von Bismarck co-founded AIM Partners, a London-based investment firm.

In August 2006 someone else died at a party hosted by von Bismarck – Anthony Casey fell 60 feet from the roof terrace of von Bismarck’s Chelsea flat and died of multiple injuries. von Bismarck was not arrested and the police did not find any drugs at the flat. The police might not have found any drugs in the flat but there were a lot of drugs in Mr Casey. The subsequent coroners report stated that there was no alcohol in Mr Casey’s blood but a significant amount of cocaine. The coroner told the Guardian that a great deal of ‘sexual paraphernalia’ had been discovered in the flat, including a variety of sex toys, lubricants and a butane gas cannister. There was also a box containing dozens of syringes. The coroner explained that there had been a ‘gay orgy’ taking place in the flat in the early hours of the morning, but all the action was between ‘consenting males in private’. As with Olivia’s death, there were a few things that weren’t ever explained – such as how Mr Casey ended up on the roof, let alone falling off it. There was a suggestion that he was ‘feeling unwell’ at the orgy so von Bismarck gave him the keys to the roof terrace.

von Bismarck left the UK after this death as well.

So who was the coroner who asked so few questions about an orgy which resulted in someone’s death, someone who was full of drugs himself but had taken part in an orgy in a flat in which no drugs had been found, although plenty of syringes with which to take drugs were present? It was none other than this blog’s friend Dr Paul Knapman, who was the coroner for Westminster and until he retired in 2011 could be relied upon to provide unbelievable explanations about the most suspicious or socially embarrassing deaths. Knapman – who is an alumnus of St George’s Hospital Medical School – conducted the inquests of Lord Lucan’s nanny Sandra Rivett, of Georgi Markov, of Roberto Calvi and of Mark Saunders the barrister shot dead by the police. Knapman was involved with the inquests of Diana and Dodi. He also handled the Marchioness Disaster and the Clapham Rail Disaster. For more details on Knapman see post ‘A Future Leader Of The Labour Party’.

In March 2007 the Daily Mail ran an article in which it claimed that Rosie Johnston was speaking ‘for the first time’ since Olivia’s death. Rosie did quite a bit of speaking in her book nearly 20 years previously, but I think that the Mail were trying to flag up that now Rosie was speaking about Olivia’s death, something that she had been rather reluctant to do before – but then none of the people who hadn’t been at the flat when Olivia died and who didn’t know that she was taking heroin, even Nicholas Vincent who had been lying next to her on the bed whilst she took heroin and then died, had been prepared to speak about Olivia’s death. Rosie stated that she hadn’t spoken about Olivia’s death ‘simply out of respect for her family’ – previously Rosie had said that she doesn’t ‘discuss the events of that night or what led up to it because it’s just not my place to’. No, Rosie’s place was to supply the drugs and then tell the police that she wasn’t on the scene when Olivia died.

The Mail explained that after Rosie came out of prison she ‘worked in a Bed and Breakfast in Devon’. Another source tells us that Rosie owned that Bed and Breakfast. Rosie realised that her life was on the up again when she landed a job as company manager for an opera festival in Italy. She ‘started off cleaning loos and organising washing-up rotas, then I moved into directing’. Rosie found herself directing successful opera productions in Oxford, Holland Park and in Hong Kong. As you do when you’ve been employed to clean the bogs.

In 1994 Rosie married, moved to New York and then lived in New Mexico – she had her own radio show and raised money for charidee. In 2002 tragedy hit Rosie – her husband died of heart failure at the age of 40. Which is quite unusual – unless the person concerned has put themselves at risk by ooh, let’s say amphetamine use… After her husband died, Rosie realised that she was an alcoholic, so she checked into an establishment called Cottonwood in Arizona, whose previous guests have included Ronnie Wood, Kate Moss and Daniella Westbrook. Rosie now realises that she has ‘an allergy’ to alcohol because every time she drank she used to end up in trouble. That particular allergy used to be known as ‘being drunk and disorderly’.

Rosie told the Mail that Bullwood Hall prison was Hell – ‘the atmosphere…was so tense and violent that towards the end of my time there I didn’t go out of my cell’. Now that is not what she said in her book – and I’m fairly certain that in her book Rosie described Bullwood Hall as having dormitories not cells.

Fortunately the Daily Mail was able to give us the good news that Rosie has now been In Rehab and had ‘finally confronted what happened’ re Olivia in therapy sessions. So as well as those people who fled the country, there’s a therapist somewhere who knows how Olivia died…Rosie told the Mail that she thought it was extraordinary that newspapers printed articles about her being on the fringes of high society and she stressed that they didn’t all take heroin – in fact Rosie and her friends just went to wine bars, they couldn’t afford anything else. Not on their trust funds.

Rosie went to school with Lady Helen Taylor, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. Olivia was at the same school, the Channons and the Kents were two families who were very close. Lady Helen Taylor experienced her own sad loss four years after Olivia’s death – her friend Henry Tennant died from AIDS at the age of 29. Before Henry died, he let on that he remembered Olivia smoking heroin at the family home in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Olivia might well have smoked heroin at the family’s other homes as well – they also owned a country mansion in Essex and two villas in Mustique, so there was quite a bit of choice as to where she smoked her heroin . Henry was the son of Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, who was a mate of Princess Margaret. The Channons were also mates of Princess Margaret. The Tennants, the Channons, Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewleyn used to have a great time on Mustique at Colin Tennant’s parties, along with David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Those parties may well have been spiced up by supplies from Dr Ann and Peter Dally, Royal physicians and dealers to the stars (please see post ‘Little Things Hitting Each Other’). Lady Helen Taylor observed that it was sad when so many of your friends and colleagues had died from AIDS. Henry’s older brother Charles died before his time as well – Charles was a heroin addict who succumbed to hepatitis. Charles Tennant hit the headlines years ago when he flogged a photo of Princess Margaret at a party in fancy dress to raise money for drugs.

Having been in rehab, Rosie had now found gainful employment, although it was only bringing in about £800/month – in 2007 – so she was a bit miffed about that. Rosie was running workshops about the dangers of drugs and alcohol for schools and prisons. She was working with an organisation called Re-Cover, a free service to find people rehab places. It’s just as well that I don’t need one because I don’t think that I could afford Rosie’s free service – she explained to the Mail that rehab isn’t as expensive as people think, she could find a place for someone in South Africa providing three months of ‘care’ for £4k.

As part of her service Rosie doesn’t advise people not to take drugs because she says that they’re going to do that anyway, she gives info about the effects of drugs and tries to explain how the law works. Presumably Rosie’s advice includes the best way to get yourself off manslaughter charges when when one of your customers dies. As part of her work with Re-Cover Rosie was undertaking a course in drug and alcohol counselling.

If Rosie fancies slumming it in north Wales rather than in south west London, I’m sure that CAIS would be delighted to have her as a peer guide, she’s just what Dafydd and Lucille are looking for.

Rosie was running some of her workshops with a company called Richardson Calder. I can find no trace of Re-Cover or Richardson Calder on the web, but I suspect that Rosie’s aspirations to educate the UK on the matter of drugs and alcohol may have hit a problem. The fall-out from Anthony Casey’s death must have presented quite a hill to climb, but a few weeks after the Mail published their article about Rosie and her drug awareness work, Rosie’s old mate von Bismarck found himself headline news again.

von Bismarck was found dead on 2 July 2007, in his almost empty flat in Chelsea, which by then was in the process of being sold for approx £5 million. von Bismarck was 44 years old. Sebastien Lucas, the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem, stated that von Bismarck had injected cocaine on an hourly basis during the day before his death and that his body contained the highest level of cocaine that Lucas had ever encountered, as well as morphine. von Bismarck had liver damage, hepatitis B and C, as well as HIV. The cause of death was given as a heroin overdose.

As well as inheriting a great deal of money, Paul Channon inherited a seat in the Commons. He was MP for Southend West, 1959-97, until he received a peerage. His father Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon had held the seat before him and before Chips, Chips’s mother-in-law Gwendolen Guinness, Countess of Iveagh was the sitting MP. Gwendoline succeeded the seat after her husband Rupert Guinness, who had been the MP, had to stand down when he became the 2nd Earl of Iveagh. It was such a given that a member of the Guinness dynasty would hold the seat that when Chips pegged out, Paul Channon put himself forward for the nomination although he was only 23 years old and was still an undergrad at Oxford. Paul won the nomination despite 129 other applications and in the face of a campaign run by Lord Beaverbrook in the Daily Express who was outraged at such nepotism. After Channon was selected as the candidate his grandmother Lady Iveagh congratulated the voters on ‘backing a colt when you knew the stable he was trained in’.

I’m not sure that I’d have chosen a colt from that particular breeder. Chips Channon is remembered as a ‘diarist’ – whilst Chips’s diaries are famous, his nearest and dearest censored them before publication and never dared reveal what was in the unpublished bits. Although Chips did marry and produce a foal, as well as enjoying alcohol laced with drugs Chips also enjoyed many gay relationships. One of his partners was the playwright Terence Rattigan and Paul Channon’s mother, Lady Honour Guinness, left Chips because of his relationship with a male landscape designer. Biographies of Channon rather unfairly make reference to his mother ‘running away with a Czech airman’ without explaining why a Czech airman was a preferable option to Chips. There was much speculation that Chips also had a relationship with his closest friend Prince Paul of Yugoslavia – whom it is believed that he named his son after – and with the Duke of Kent.

Paul Channon mixed with high society from birth. When he was a baby his nanny used to take him for a walk in the park in his pram with her friend, the nanny of the Duke of Kent and her charge, the future Duke of Kent. Channon remained a lifelong friend of the Duke of Kent.

Chips was friends with Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson and Edward gave Channon a toy panda in the run up to the abdication. During WWII Channon was evacuated to the home of the Astors in New York where he became acquainted with their neighbour President Roosevelt.

Channon went to Eton and for his national service joined the Royal Horse Guards, with whom he served in Cyprus. Among his duties there was escorting Prince Philip’s nieces. Channon then went to Christ Church, Oxford where he was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Channon left university to take up his seat in Parliament. He served under five Tory leaders – Macmillan, Douglas Home, Heath, Thatcher and Major. He was PPS to R.A. Butler, 1961-64, whilst Butler was Home Secretary, First Secretary of State and Foreign Secretary. Chips had also been Butler’s PPS – Channon was really chuffed that not only had he inherited the dosh, the family mansion, the Parliamentary seat, but he’d even inherited the job of Butler’s PPS. He commented that it was ‘his life’s dream’.

Channon was a Heathite and in 1967 Heath appointed him spokesman for the Arts. Channon occupied junior Ministerial roles between 1970-74, including Minister of State for N Ireland for six months in 1972. This was whilst Willie Whitelaw was Secretary of State for N Ireland and on 7 July 1972, Channon and Willie met IRA leader Sean Mac Stiofain and other Republicans at Channon’s house in Cheyne Walk. (I know that Thatcher kept maintaining that the Tories didn’t talk to terrorists and that only Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell met IRA leaders, but she was lying.) The talks with the IRA weren’t much of a success – two weeks later the IRA bombed Belfast on Bloody Friday.

Whilst he was a junior Minister at the Department of the Environment Channon installed a tiger skin sofa in his office.

In Feb 1974 Channon joined Heath’s Shadow Cabinet but Thatcher kicked him out again when she became leader of the Tory Party in Feb 1975. Thatch was alleged to have seriously disliked Channon and told Reginald Maudling that ‘there will be no room in my government for that millionaire’. She ended up having to break that particular vow.

In 1979 Channon was appointed Deputy Head of the Civil Service Department – he became Head in 1980 when his boss Lord Soames took up the post of Governor of Rhodesia. Channon was made a member of the Privy Council in 1980 as well.

In 1981 Channon was appointed Minister for the Arts, succeeding Norman St John Stevas. Channon took the call from No 10 offering him the job at one of his villas on Mustique. Channon really loved opera, so he managed to increase the spending on opera whilst he was Arts Minister. After the General Election of 1983 he was appointed Minister for Trade – Cecil Parkinson’s resignation after Sara Keays conveniently announced her pregnancy in the middle of the Tory Party conference resulting in maximum embarrassment for the Tories resulted in that millionaire becoming acting Secretary of State. Tebbit was appointed Secretary of State over Channon’s head, but then Tebbit had to step aside as a result of needing surgery, so that millionaire became acting Secretary of State again. On 24 Jan 1986 that millionaire became the President of the Board of Trade and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry after yet another resignation – this time of Leon Brittan, over the Westland affair. Which was certainly ironic because Leon Brittan only resigned over that to save Thatcher’s skin after she’d misled the Cabinet and no-one wanted to give Heseltine ammunition.

While Channon was at the DTI the scandal involving Guinness’s take-over of Distillers blew up. Guinness had been involved in fraudulent practice by inflating the worth of their shares and an investigation was undertaken by the DTI. Obviously Channon, being a man of integrity, could not be part of that investigation, it would have been a conflict of interest. So Michael Howard led the investigation. The Michael Howard who less than ten years later completely screwed Mary Wynch over, leaving her ruined after she had dared win a legal case against Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, Clwyd Health Authority and the Home Office, after she had been unlawfully arrested, imprisoned and fleeced of her inheritance by Dafydd.

Paul Channon was a Director of Guinness so he will have known something about the fraudulent practices which Howard investigated.

Other diplomatic incidents whilst Channon was at the DTI were the proposals by the Gov’t that British Leyland should be sold to General Motors and that Austin Rover should be sold to Ford. Channon stopped both sales on the grounds that it would be political suicide for the Tories if they went ahead. However, whilst Channon was in post Leyland Trucks were merged with DAF Holland.

Channon was involved in the arms to Iraq scandal whilst he was at the DTI. Why some years later were Blair et al so certain that Saddam was in possession of WMD? Because Channon and Alan Clarke ensured that he was sold the components that were needed to build them.

On 13 June 1987 Channon became Secretary of State for Transport. Whilst he was in that position: the Zeebrugge Ferry tragedy occurred; the Kings Cross Fire happened which resulted in 31 deaths; there were 35 deaths from the three train crash at Clapham Junction; 270 people were killed when a bomb exploded on the Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie; 44 people were killed when the British Midland plane crashed onto the M1 at Kegworth.

The cause of the fire at King’s Cross was never identified but it was admitted that there were long-standing serious health and safety failures and a managerial vacuum. The British Government received a bomb warning just before Lockerbie but didn’t make the information public for some two weeks and Channon went on holiday to Mustique two days after the Lockerbie disaster anyway.

Thatch sacked Channon as Transport Secretary in July 1989. Paul Foot wrote an interesting account of what was thought to have led to Channon’s sacking in the London Review of Books in 1994. He stated that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. It seems that on the same day, possibly a few hours before Bush’s call, Channon was a guest of five prominent political correspondents at the Garrick. It was agreed that anything said over lunch would be kept between them and not made public. Channon announced that Dumfries and Galloway police had conducted a major investigation into Lockerbie, had found those responsible and that arrests were imminent. At least one journo broke ranks and made the info public. Channon subsequently denied being the source of the leak. The Mirror called him a liar on its front page. Channon did not sue or complain. A few months later he was quietly sacked – and was replaced by the rehabilitated Cecil Parkinson. It was felt that Thatcher couldn’t publicly blame Channon for the leak because the main problem with it was that it coincided with her instructions from Washington.

Days after Parkinson took over at Transport he had the Marchioness Disaster to deal with.

Channon did not hold another Ministerial post. He wanted to be Speaker – of course he did, three previous members of his family had been Speaker, but he didn’t pull that one off.

After he returned to the backbenches, the man whose family business had been investigated for fraud Chaired the Commons Finance and Services Select Committee and for an encore someone let him Chair the Transport Select Committee. Probably because his ancestors had.

The Torygraph’s obituary of Channon observed that he had a ‘sense of fun’ and could speak backwards and used to ask his staff to speak in foreign accents. It must have been like an episode of ‘It Ain’t Half Racist Mum’ in the DTI. In fact Channon had such a sense of fun that he backed Thatcher in refusing to extend sanctions against South Africa. It was also observed that Olivia’s death had been particularly painful for him because it had happened at Christ Church, his old college – just to make it even worse, Chips went to Christ Church as well. Channon’s ‘love of old buildings’ had caused him in 1962 to promote legislation to ’empower’ local authorities to give grants for the upkeep of historic houses. Channon owned two such houses himself.

Channon was proud of his record on road building whilst at the Dept of Transport. He built new motorways and widened others. When he discovered that a new piece of motorway was planned to pass near to his country house in Essex, Channon and his wife Ingrid – another member of the Guinness family herself who had previously been married to Channon’s cousin Jonathan Guinness, there was a very small gene pool in that stable of which Channon’s granny was so proud – held a garden party to raise funds to campaign against the building of the motorway.

John Biffen’s obituary of Channon observed cryptically that ‘his ministerial duties were not particularly enjoyable, he bore them with good nature…great sadness struck him soon after leaving the Commons, such that he was unable to demonstrate his measured approach to politics as an active member of the Lords’. I don’t why Channon tolerated those ministerial duties, it wasn’t as if he needed the salary – in 1990 his share in Guinness alone was worth £184 million.

After finding out about Channon’s love of opera and how his daughter’s dealer found a new career for herself as an opera director, my ears pricked up this morning when I heard George Osborne being interviewed on Radio 4. George was talking about his love of opera. He explained that politicians are frightened to say that they like opera lest they are thought to be elitist, but he really loves it. Is he perhaps angling for business for Rosie? George mentioned that when he was at university the culture was very laddish and one had to state an interest in football. No George, you were at Oxford with Dave and the gang – no-one gave a bugger about football, that was for the oiks, it was huge quantities of Class A drugs that were in vogue with your friends.

George’s brother Adam likes Class A drugs. Adam was a Top Doctor – he trained with the best of course at Tommy’s. Not only was Adam Osborne a Top Doctor but he was a psychiatrist. So it was quite understandable that the GMC didn’t strike him off after he was caught breaching prescribing rules whilst prescribing drugs to a prostitute. Well the patient was a prostitute and Adam was a Top Doctor, he couldn’t possibly have been to blame for the misunderstanding. Some two or three years ago Adam was up in front of the GMC again. For threatening a patient with whom he had been having sex. I think illicit drugs were involved once more as well. Not only did Adam threaten the patient whom he had been shagging, but Adam’s wife – who was also a Top Doctor – threatened the patient as well. They both told her to keep quiet about Adam having sex with her. Whilst he was having sex with this patient, Adam told her how much he and his wife enjoy threesomes. The GMC did actually manage to strike Adam off after that. Although the last that I read they hadn’t taken any action against his wife. So if anyone wants to get their paws on controlled drugs, have a threesome with two Top Doctors and end up being threatened by them, the lady doctor Mrs Osborne is the one to book an appointment with.

The Daily Telegraph didn’t print a word about the activities of the Drs Osborne, although the Daily Mail went to town on it.

The Osbornes are obviously a very understanding bunch when it comes to Top Doctors abusing their positions. Whilst George was Chancellor, CAIS were given more than a million quid from the LIBOR fund after misrepresenting themselves and telling a load of porkies (see post ‘George Osborne Enters The Picture’).

In this morning’s radio interview, not only did George stress that he was still very good mates with Dave, the son of that very liberal Oxford Magistrate, but he hinted at a political comeback. He mentioned that people are discussing who will succeed Theresa as PM – Theresa, he can smell blood…

I’m kicking off this third post in the Tony Blair series with yet another person who was PPS to Blair, a man who was appointed PPS to Blair just as David Hanson (see post ‘The Most Dangerous Man In The World – Part II) moved upward and onward. I am talking about Keith Hill, who was PPS to Blair from 2005 until Blair resigned in 2007.

Keith Hill was the Labour MP for Streatham, 1992-2010. So he was another one who was selected as a candidate before Blair got his hands on the controls of the Labour Party machine. In fact Hill was the Labour candidate for Blaby (Nigel Lawson’s constituency in Leicestershire) in 1979, so Hill had been around for a very long time.

Keith Hill was born and went to school in Leicester. He then went to Oxford – and after graduating completed a Diploma in Education at that hive of activity of the paedophiles’ friends whose stronghold was/is in Wales, Aberystwyth University. Hill then lectured at Leicester University and at Strathclyde University, 1969-73.

The fact that Keith Hill both taught at Leicester University and some ten years later stood for Blaby suggests that he retained links to his place of origin. Could Keith Hill have been someone else who knew about the activities of Greville Janner and his friend Frank Beck with children in care and that Leicester City Council, the Social Services and people in Leicester University were concealing child abuse?

Hill worked as a research officer for the Labour Party’s International Dept, 1974-76 and was then the political officer with the NUR (National Union of Railwaymen), which subsequently amalgamated with the NUS (National Union of Seamen) – with which John Prescott had a long association – to form the RMT (National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) in 1990. The RMT became a very powerful union – it is a big supporter of Jeremy Corbyn – thanks to the efforts of Bob Crow, it’s General Secretary, 2002-14. Crow was loathed by many for claiming to speak for the working class whilst he drew a salary of approx. £150k pa, dined in Mayfair restaurants and went on luxury cruises. However many of those who loathed Crow were dreadful themselves and certainly didn’t live modestly – Crow’s critics included Blair, Priti Patel, Max Hastings and Richard Littlejohn. In 1997 Bob Crow briefly joined the Socialist Labour Party, which was established by his mate Arthur Scargill. Michael Mansfield – who studiously ignored anything to do with the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, as well as other child abuse cases and worked with a number of people who had colluded with child abuse (see post ‘Workers’ Play Time’) – was also a mate of Scargills and co-founded the Socialist Labour Party. I saw Arthur Scargill speak at Bangor University about six years ago – the person who seemed to have arranged his visit to Bangor was a paedophiles’ friend (see post ‘It’s All About Protecting Children’).

In 1992 Keith Hill took the seat of Streatham from the sitting Conservative MP Sir William Shelton, who had occupied the seat since 1974. Prior to that, Shelton had been the Tory MP for Clapham.

William Shelton had been one of the key people who ensured that Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975. Airey Neave managed Thatcher’s campaign, with Shelton as his second in command. Shelton was responsible for mobilising the right wing of the Party behind Thatcher and also sent out misinformation to the media in order to manipulate the campaign outcome. Shelton would have been good at that – before entering politics he had pursued a career in advertising and he remained in that business whilst he was an MP. He was the MD for Grosvenor Advertising in 1969, the Chairman of Washer, Fox, Coughlin and in 1983 set up Shelton Consultants. He was appointed a Director of Saracen Consultants in 1987. Shelton undertook a lot of international work and at times had been based in Colombia and Venezuela.

Shelton was politically active in south London for years. In 1964 he was President of Wandsworth Young Conservatives; he sat on the GLC representing Wandsworth in 1967; in 1968 he was Chief Whip for the Conservative majority on ILEA. Whilst he was MP for Streatham, he clashed with the leadership of Lambeth Borough Council whilst the Council was under the control of Ted Knight. That will have been when Peter Mandelson was a member of the Council, along with Paul Boateng, Linda Bellos and many other friends of this blog. Whilst Lambeth Council’s children’s homes were rife with paedophiles and when the Council were sending some of the kids in its care to north Wales – where they were abused by paedophiles. I can’t find any references to Shelton speaking out about that though – or about the abuse of children in Wandsworth or about the corruption and malpractice at St George’s Hospital Medical School which from 1980 onwards was located just down the road and covered the population of Streatham. The wrongdoing that I witnessed and experienced at St George’s and the associated mental health unit Springfield Hospital took place between 1989-91, whilst Shelton was MP. As did the bizarre behaviour of the corrupt detectives in Streatham Police Station in 1990/91 when the mental health services in north Wales perjured themselves and demanded that I be arrested (see post ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London’) – detectives which included a man who boasted about having worked for the North Wales Police and whilst he was stationed there had, with his mates in the police, beaten up and framed local young men from Bethesda and thrown them in Llyn Ogwen. He had got away with it every time thanks to his friendship with a local corrupt magistrate Geoff, who was the landlord of the Douglas Arms Hotel in Bethesda. I remember those days well – on occasions, young men were found drowned in that lake, after having ‘gone swimming whilst drunk’.

Geoff and his wife Sheila had a son who, like Aled Jones and Catrin Finch, was a bit of a child star. Geoff’s son was a very talented organist and succeeded in winning a scholarship to Eton. As with Aled and Catrin, TV programmes and media articles appeared regarding the genius that was Geoff’s son. I think that he went on to either Oxford or Cambridge and after that returned to north Wales, to St Asaph Cathedral. There was a problem at that Cathedral – in 2015 Hugh Davies, the man who had been the choirmaster and organist at St Asaph, 1985-98, was imprisoned for the possession of child porn. Even more worryingly, a former music pupil of Davies’s who had alleged that Davies had abused him whilst he was a teenager killed himself.

Sir William Shelton was also MP for Streatham when Oliver Brooke, Professor of Paediatrics at St George’s, was jailed in 1986 for the possession of huge quantities of child porn – which he had stored in offices at St George’s…

There was another notorious establishment in Shelton’s constituency – Cynthia Payne’s brothel at Ambleside Avenue. Cynthia’s brothel came to national prominence in 1978 when the police raided it and found a sex party in full swing attended by over 50 men, including a peer, a number of solicitors and a vicar. What was not published in the press was that a number of consultants from St George’s availed themselves of the services of Cynthia’s brothel – she was also known to have judges on her guest list. After the trial in 1980, Cynthia ended up in Holloway, but none of the brothel’s customers were named let alone prosecuted. The police raided Cynthia again in 1986, whilst another party was underway but at her trial in 1987 Cynthia was acquitted.

I do not mind if Cynthia held sex parties for consenting adults and I certainly don’t think that she should have been imprisoned for doing so, but the worrying thing about Cynthia’s brothel was the allegations that men with a taste for sexual activities which did not involve consenting adults were using it as a networking base. Friendships between judges, Top Doctors, solicitors, policemen etc made in the brothel could have proved very useful in the events of people being charged for sex offences.

The detectives who worked on the Oliver Brooke case were livid when Brooke was released early on appeal after the judge compared Brooke’s collection of child porn to a collection of cigarette cards. The police who had investigated Brooke maintained that he was Mr Big in a pan-European child porn ring.

Cynthia Payne was very friendly with Screaming Lord Sutch, the leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and at one point Sutch shared the house/brothel at Ambleside Avenue with her. Sutch was famous for polling more votes than Dr Death’s continuing SDP in the 1990 Bootle election, but what was less well-known was that David Sutch suffered from manic-depression and at times became very ill. I think the arrangement with Cynthia was that they were looking after each other, having both been through a bad time. Sutch hung himself in 1999 after a long period of severe depression. He had been under medical care for years and was known to have been in a very bad way. So like all those former kids in care and mental health patients in north Wales who knew the names of the guilty and the details of their crimes, it would seem that David Sutch too wasn’t given the care that he needed when he was seriously ill and WHOOPS he killed himself. And his memories will have died with him – the memories of all those people who were visiting the brothel, those doctors and judges and peers and politicians who would have had a lot to lose if ever they were to be named in say, a child abuse scandal and David Sutch recognised their names.

David Sutch hung himself just before the Waterhouse Report was published. So he was not receiving appropriate help for severe depression whilst the Waterhouse Inquiry was underway and taking evidence.

Why do I remember so much about the brothel at Ambleside Avenue? Because at the time when I was being hounded out of my job at St George’s and arrested on trumped up charges at the behest of the mental health services in north Wales, I lived in Streatham. Not a million miles away from Ambleside Avenue. No I didn’t ever pop across for a cup of tea with Cynthia and Lord Sutch, but that’s because I didn’t at the time know that St George’s and their associates had links with and were concealing the criminal activities of the paedophiles’ friends in north Wales – I only found out about that years later, when my lawyer obtained documentation from St George’s and Springfield.

I described in my post ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London’ how those esteemed experts at St George’s all agreed with Dafydd and the paedophiles’ friends that I was Most Dangerous and was probably planning to murder Dafydd et al in their beds, yet Professor Nigel Eastman – one of the corrupt Top Doctors at St George’s who is a mate of Helena Kennedy (see post ‘Eve Was Framed – As Were A Lot Of Other People’) – told me that he thought that I ought to go back to live in north Wales. This was my desire as well, because I hated London and presumed that they were simply all quite mad down there and although there was also a bunch of mad, corrupt Top Doctors constantly having me arrested when I was in north Wales as well, I reckoned that if I was going to be threatened and harassed constantly I’d rather be living in nice surroundings. However I did think it a little odd that Eastman had recommended this – did he want me to murder Jones and the paedophiles in cold blood and that’s why he recommended that I go back and live on their patch?? But what if Eastman et al had been concerned about who I might meet if I remained living in Streatham? They knew that I had researched Jones and the paedophiles’ friends, they knew that I was identifying their associates and they knew that I was beginning to find out the extent of their criminal activities. Just imagine if I continued to live in Streatham and started comparing notes with Cynthia Payne or David Sutch…

It is interesting to note that at her second trial Cynthia was acquitted. In 1987. By which time, Mary Wynch, Alison Taylor and I were making a lot of noise about the criminal activities of Dafydd Alun Jones and Lucille Hughes in north Wales. The Dafydd and Lucille who were facilitating a paedophile ring in north Wales which was trafficking children to London – the Dafydd and Lucille who were on very good terms with all those Top Doctors and social workers based at St George’s.

I was interested to read that William Shelton was ‘a traditionalist on moral issues’, in the light of what was happening in his constituency.

Dafydd Alun Jones was a traditionalist on moral issues as well – at least when he was giving talks to the members of various Churches in north Wales (see post ‘A Serious Moral Collapse?’). Then when he’d finished his lecture he would return to base to facilitate a paedophile gang, sexually exploit the patients, lie in Court and sell drugs to addicts.

After Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, William Shelton worked as her PPS for a year. Shelton was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Dept of Education and Science, 1981-83. The Secretary of State for Education and the Science at the time was Sir Keith Joseph. Brown and me wrote to Keith Joseph when we were undergrads – about student funding – and Keith Joseph wrote us a very rude letter back. Thatcher probably put us on her hit list then and subsequently escalated our names to the very top when we complained about Gwynne the lobotomist and Dafydd and the paedophiles a few years later.

As befits someone who was a traditionalist on moral issues, William Shelton was banned from being a company director for five years in 1997, after an investigation into ‘financial irregularities’ in his company Access To Justice. Shelton had set up Access To Justice in 1995 to provide free legal advice for people on low incomes. Which sounds an interesting company for a hard right Thatcherite to have established. I wonder who was receiving the free legal advice and for what. Or indeed who was providing it.

After Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, the victory party was held at Shelton’s house in Pimlico – Thatch and Denis attended the celebration.

Sir Peter Morrison – the Tory MP elected for Chester in 1974 and who supported Thatcher’s 1975 leadership campaign – was known to be abusing children in care in north Wales. One boy from London alleged that Sir Peter Morrison abused him and some children in care from Wrexham maintained that they were taken to London and supplied to men for sex. Morrison was Deputy Chair of the Tory Party, 1986-87 and Thatcher’s PPS in 1990. When Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Tory Party by ‘stalking horse’ Sir Anthony Meyer in 1989, it was William Shelton who led her campaign. Anthony Meyer didn’t manage to depose Thatcher on that occasion but she was sufficiently weakened by him to crumble in 1990 when there was another leadership challenge. The organiser of Thatcher’s leadership campaign in 1990 was Sir Peter Morrison.

I told the story of Sir Anthony Meyer and his leadership challenge in my post ‘The Celtic Iron Lady And Yet More Recent History’. Anthony Meyer died a real unsung hero. Not only did he know how bloody dangerous Thatcher was and how dysfunctional and corrupt the Tories in Clwyd – and their leaderene Beata Brookes – were, but I think that Anthony Meyer knew about the paedophile ring as well and was trying to chuck a spanner in their works. Meyer was constructed as a deluded old bugger with grandiose ambitions – he wasn’t, he was a very brave man who did north Wales a very big favour and I only wish that there had been more politicians like Meyer, instead of hordes of weak greedy little people who ignored something horrific in order to bag a seat in Parliament.

To return to Keith Hill, the mate of Blair’s who was MP for Streatham after Shelton. Years before he was appointed PPS to Blair, in 1997 Hill was appointed PPS to a big buddy of Blair, Hilary Armstrong. Armstrong was one of Blair’s inner circle and Blair repeatedly praises her loyalty and commitment to New Labour in his autobiography.

Hilary Armstrong was Labour MP for North West Durham, 1987-10 and is now in the Lords. She was a student at the University of East London (then West Ham Technical Institute) and then went to the University of Birmingham to do a Diploma in Social Work. Hilary describes herself as a ‘former social worker and lecturer’ – she lectured in Community and Youth Work at Sunderland Poly and was a community worker at Southwick Neighbourhood Action Project, Sunderland. Hilary also did a stint with VSO in Kenya.

So Hilary was yet another social worker selected as a candidate for Labour during those years when it was evident that there was one hell of a problem with children in the care of social workers being sexually abused. Just to add to the suspicion in Hilary’s case, there could have been a great degree of control exercised by the Labour Party machine regarding the choice of Hilary as a candidate and indeed when it was decided that Hilary might be needed in the Commons – because Hilary took over her dad’s Parliamentary seat when he retired! I’ll return to Hilary’s dad soon.

Hilary was a Durham County Councillor, for Crook North Division, 1985-88. She was PPS to John Smith when he was leader of the Labour Party 1992-94 and Hilary played a major part in ensuring that the Labour Party adopted the policy of OMOV. Hilary was a member of AMICUS, the union which was formed from a merger between the AEUU and MSF. At least one of the MSF reps at St George’s Hospital Medical School in the late 80s/early 90s was corrupt and was concealing serious misconduct and criminal activity. AMICUS later merged with the TGWU to form UNITE. Hilary used her union links to drum up support within the Labour Party to rewrite Clause IV.

In the 1992 General Election, both Tim Farron and Theresa May stood against Hilary.

Hilary Armstrong spent four years as Minister for Local Gov’t in the DETR (Dept for the Environment, Transport and the Regions) and then the DTLR (Dept for Transport, Local Gov’t and the Regions). Hilary’s boss during these years was none other than John Prescott.

After the 2001 General Election Blair appointed Hilary Chief Whip. In May 2006 she became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; she was Minister for Social Exclusion, 2006-07. Hilary resigned from the Gov’t in June 2007 when Blair resigned as PM. Gordon subsequently appointed her as Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s Manifesto Committee regarding policy ideas covering children…

In 2010 Hilary was given her peerage. She is Chair of Changing Lives, a charity in the North East which provides services for people with complex needs – Changing Lives is commissioned to provide some services for the NHS.

Hilary is married to Paul Corrigan, who was a senior advisor to Blair and his Health Secretaries Alan Milburn and John Reid, 2001-07. Between 2007-09 Corrigan was Director of Strategy and Commissioning at London Strategic Health Authority.

Corrigan ticks every box that someone should who has been involved with our institutionally corrupt NHS which has concealed neglect, poor care, patient deaths and has ruined the lives of whistleblowers. He is or has been: a non-executive Director of the CQC, as well as of the Kings Fund and Nuffield Trust; adjunct Professor of Health Policy at Imperial College; adjunct Professor of Health Policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; involved with Public Private Ltd (a consultancy firm based at Queen Elizabeth Street); a member of the Strategic Committee of Guys and Tommys Charity; a Trustee of the Ways To Wellness Foundation in Newcastle; a Trustee of the English Touring Theatre.

Corrigan also works for NHS Providers, teaching on induction courses for non-executive and executive directors. He also describes himself as ‘a consultant and a coach’.

I have previously speculated that the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal which blew up between Feb and July 1987 in the North East of England provided a useful distraction and muddied the waters in a most convenient way at a time when Mary Wynch, Alison Taylor and I were all screaming loudly about the criminal activities in north Wales. My post ‘The Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Connection?’ details some of the links between the paedophiles’ friends in north Wales and the North East of England.

Now to the man whose retirement enabled Hilary, his only child, to bag a seat in Parliament – Ernest Armstrong, Labour MP for North West Durham, 1964-87.

In 1983 one Tony Blair, a barrister living in London, was elected as Labour MP for the newly created constituency of Sedgefield, just next door to Ernest’s constituency. Just like that.

Ernest Armstrong went to Leeds Teacher Training College and became a primary school headmaster. He was elected as a Councillor on Sunderland Borough Council and Chaired the Sunderland Education Committee, 1960-65. Ernest was elected to Parliament in 1964. In 1965 he was appointed PPS to Tony Greenwood (who had been Deputy Leader of the Labour Party under Clement Attlee) and then PPS to Merlyn Rees.

Merlyn Rees was Labour MP for Leeds South (which changed its name to Morley and Leeds South in 1983), 1963-92. We now know that a paedophile ring was in operation in the Leeds area whilst Merlyn Rees was MP for that constituency. Furthermore there was serious police corruption in the region and it was also the stamping ground of Jimmy Savile. Savile was molesting patients in the local hospitals and Yorkshire was also host to the Kerr Haslam scandal. William Kerr and Michael Haslam were two psychiatrists in York who were known to be sexually assaulting and raping their female patients between the 1960s and 90s. They were not stopped until they had almost hit retirement age, never faced any action from the GMC and were not put on trial until the early years of the millennium – the trials were at Leeds Crown Court. Even then, only one of them went to prison and only for a short while. See post ‘All The Ingredients Of A Scandal…’ for details of the Kerr Haslam scandal.

Merlyn Rees was born in Pontypridd in south Wales but moved to London and went to school at Harrow. He was Secretary of State for N Ireland 1974-76, when the sexual abuse of children at the Kincora Boys Home in Belfast by Whitehall civil servants and members of the British Army was concealed. Rees then served as Home Secretary under Jim Callaghan between 1974-79. Bryn Estyn had been an approved school managed directly by the Home Office until just before Merlyn Rees was appointed Home Secretary. He will have known about the sexual assaults and brutality on the boys there. The Home Office was responsible for running Risley Remand Centre. Mary Wynch had been unlawfully arrested and imprisoned in Risley Remand Centre by Dafydd and the paedophiles’ friends whilst Merlyn Rees was Home Secretary. Dafydd and the paedophiles’ friends were using that place as their personal prison which was why Mary ended up in there – along with the kids in care from north Wales who complained about being sexually abused or beaten up.

Merlyn Rees retired from the Commons at the 1992 General Election. Just as it was all going off in North Wales, with police investigations into a suspected paedophile ring, former residents of children’s homes naming Gordon Anglesea – a senior officer with the North Wales Police – as having been one of the people who molested them and reports of the abuse of children in care in north Wales appearing in the London media. Then days before the General Election, five possible witnesses with information about the paedophile gang in north Wales were killed in a fire started by a petrol bomb – the man who was alleged to have confessed to starting the fire was found dead days later having been hit by a lorry on a country road and one survivor of the fire died in mysterious circumstances after he alleged that victims of the paedophile gang were being murdered (see post ‘The Silence of the Welsh Lambs).

As soon as Merlyn Rees stepped down from the Commons he was given a peerage and became Lord Merlyn-Rees.

Ernest was a junior Minister in the Dept of Education and Science under Secretary of State Reg Prentice, 1974-75. Reg Prentice was a Minister in both Labour and Conservative Gov’ts. He was Labour MP for East Ham North (which later became Newham North East) from 1957 until 1977 when he defected to the Tories. Before he defected he was Minister of State at the Dept of Education and Science, 1964-66 – under Secretary of State Tony Crosland – then Secretary of State for Education and Science 1974-75.

Prentice left the Labour Party in 1977 after local activists deselected him. The local party had been infiltrated by Militant and in an attempt to ensure that Prentice wasn’t deselected, a Julian Lewis posed as a Labour moderate and joined the constituency party. It was later revealed that Julian Lewis had been backed by the far right Freedom Association. Lewis’s attempts to shore up Prentice’s position in the Labour Party were unsuccessful although he did gain control of the Newham Labour Party for a short time in 1976, but Lewis himself was elected as Tory MP for the New Forest in 1997, a seat he still occupies. Throughout the 80s Julian Lewis took part in covert activities to oppose left wing causes, particularly the anti-nuclear movement. He used Ann Widdecombe for this purpose (see post ‘Doris Karloff – Honest About Her Expenses But Not Much Else’).

After being deselected in Newham, Prentice became Tory MP for Daventry in 1979, after receiving considerable help from Lady Kisty Hesketh, Chair of the Daventry Conservative Association. Daventry is in Northamptonshire. The county contains St Andrews Hospital, a psychiatric hospital which for decades has been the centre of allegations of abuse and neglect and played a role in the case of Jeremy Bamber, a suspected serious miscarriage of justice (see post ‘Family Annihilation’). Much more recently there has been great concern at the number of learning disabled people being detained at St Andrews against the wishes of both they and their families. At least one such patient has died as a result of ‘restraint’ and ‘medication’.

After being elected as a Tory MP Prentice enjoyed a new lease of life and became a junior Minister for Social Security in the DHSS between 1979-81 in Thatcher’s Gov’t. The Secretary of State for Social Security at the time was Patrick Jenkin, who was best remembered for stating that if God had wanted us to have equal opportunities he wouldn’t have created men and women. Which is almost as good as the old joke about the vicar who wrote a letter to the Times saying that if God had wanted us to run around naked we’d have been born with no clothes on.

There was of course organised abuse of children in Newham in the 70s and 80s – it was yet another Borough which was sending children in care to children’s homes in north Wales…

In 1992 John Major gave Prentice a peerage. In his later years, Prentice was President of the Conservative Association at Devizes. The local MP was Michael Ancram, Chairman of the Conservative Party.

After his stint with Reg Prenctice, Ernest Armstrong then became a junior Minister in the Dept of the Environment, 1975-79 – he served under two Secretaries of State there, initially under his friend Tony Crosland and then under Peter Shore. Peter Shore was MP for Stepney, 1964-97. Shortly after he was elected, he was appointed PPS to Harold Wilson the PM. Denis Healey referred to Shore as ‘Harold’s lapdog’. Stepney is in the Borough of Tower Hamlets. Tower Hamlets was yet another Borough that sent kids in its care into the arms of the paedophiles in north Wales (see post ‘Tower Hamlets, Paul Boateng and Tessa Jowell’). In 1994 Blair nominated Shore as his representative on the Commission On Standards in Public Life. Peter Shore received a peerage in 1997.

Ernest Armstrong’s obituary in the ‘Indie’ states that Ernest was very influential on Tony Crosland and civil servant Toby Weaver, whilst Crosland was Secretary of State for Education and Science, 1965-67. For more details about the bisexual Tony Crosland and the swinger whom he had an affair with, Roy Jenkins – whom Blair described as his ‘mentor’ – see post ‘The Most Dangerous Man In The World – Part I’.

Between 1981-87 Ernest was Deputy Speaker. He was Deputy to George Thomas aka Lord Tonypandy – who concealed corruption and abuse of children whilst he was in the Welsh Office (see post ‘The Cradle of Filth’) and was posthumously investigated for historical child abuse himself, as was his friend Leo Abse.

George Thomas said of Armstrong that he was ‘a man whose reliability was as solid as Durham Cathedral’. Betty Boothroyd – who became Speaker herself and in that capacity prevented Ann Clwyd from asking questions in the House regarding the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal at the time of the investigations in the early 1990s – stated that Armstrong ‘helped to steer my early Parliamentary career’.

The good thing about Ernest was that he was a devout Christian – like his daughter’s bosom buddy Tony Blair and Tony’s wife Cherie. Ernest was to be precise a Methodist and was Vice-Chair of the Methodist Conference, 1974-75. Ernest was active in the UNA (United Nations Association).

Dafydd Alun Jones was invited to speak at Bangor University by the UNA some years ago – Dafydd was billed as an expert on drug abuse and was going to be speaking about that subject. Dafydd’s event was cancelled after I offered to attend and distribute information about Dafydd’s previous.

Like William Shelton, Ernest took a firm line on morality and he seconded Tim Sainsbury’s Private Members Indecent Displays (Control) Bill, 1980-81. I wonder if Ernest knew that Hilary’s and Blair’s friend Alastair Campbell used to write pornographic stories for Forum magazine? Although to be fair Forum didn’t have pictures in, just letters and stories and medical advice provided by Dr Philip Cauthery, who doubled up as the student doctor at Aston University whilst Aston had one of the highest rates of student suicides among UK universities. Cauthery also ran a sex therapy business with Dr Martin Cole in Birmingham, whom Mary Whitehouse tried to have prosecuted for running a brothel.

Ernest Armstrong was political advisor for the TV drama House of Cards. I never saw this, but I did hear a lot about it – I understand that the storyline centred around a particularly unpleasant scheming politician who was prepared to ruin and kill people in order to become PM.

Peter Howarth, one of the paedophiles who worked at Bryn Estyn who eventually went to prison for the serious sexual abuse of boys there, had between 1966-73 been employed at Axwell School in Gateshead. Matt Arnold had been the headmaster at Axwell whilst Howarth worked there. In May 1973 Arnold was appointed Head of Bryn Estyn. In November 1973 Howarth was appointed to a senior position in Bryn Estyn.

Just to remind readers – Ernest Armstrong was a teacher whose main interest was in education and he Chaired the Sunderland Education Committee between 1960-65. He also influenced and was friends with Tony Crosland, whilst Crosland was the Secretary of State for Education – whilst Howarth and Arnold worked at Gateshead.

Howarth and Arnold were not the only abusers of children in the North East of England. There was an approved school in Durham run by an ‘expert’ in ‘troubled children’ where children were being sexually and physically assaulted and whilst Blair was MP for Sedgefield one of the activists in his local Labour Party was convicted of child abuse.

After Keith Hill had finished being PPS to Hilary Armstrong, in 1998 he was appointed Assistant Gov’t Whip and then in 1999 Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (and Minister for London) at the DETR. Hill was responsible for local transport and transport in London. Hill also prepared the way for the London Mayoral elections and was Minister for the national joke that was the Millennium Dome.

After the 2001 General Election, Hill was appointed Deputy Chief Whip by Blair.

In 2003 Hill joined the many paedophiles’ friends in the Privy Council. (He was offered a knighthood in 2010 but turned it down.)

Until the 2005 General Election, Hill was Minister for Housing and Planning in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, ie. Prescott. It was after the 2005 reshuffle that Keith Hill became PPS to Blair. Hill returned to the backbenches when Gordon Brown became PM in 2007.

After leaving Parliament, Hill became Chair of Lambeth Living, an ALMO (arms-length management organisation) which administers most of Lambeth’s social housing stock. In 2012 he was appointed as the independent regulator for ARMA (the Association of Managing Agents). ARMA is described as a trade association for firms managing private residential leasehold blocks of flats in England and Wales. It is a ‘self-regulating regime’. I cannot help wondering why, if the firms managing the accommodation are abiding by the law and adhering to health and safety regulations, they need Keith Hill to allow them to do what they want in the name of ‘self-regulation’ and ‘arms length management’.

Grenfell Tower anyone?

In Feb 1915 Keith became Chair of the Residents Commission On Council Housing for Hammersmith and Fulham Council. We are told that ‘the Commission is working with council house tenants to explore how they can be given more control and safeguards over their homes, rents and service charges’. Sounds like service userdom for tenants to me – consult them and hold them responsible for things which they have no control over. It will then be their fault when their houses go up in flames a la Grenfell Tower.

When Keith Hill stood down from the Commons, Chuka Umunna took over the seat of Streatham. A feature in a local paper looked back on Keith Hill’s time as MP for the constituency and mentioned that in the late 1980s Keith Hill shared a flat with the transgender cross-dressing comedian, major Labour Party donor and aspiring Labour MP Eddie Izzard. Eddie is a big supporter of Jeremy Corbyn – who was one of the many people politically involved in Islington when Islington Council’s children’s homes had been infiltrated by a paedophile gang with links to organised crime. The paper reported that Hill and Izzard shared a flat in Ambleside Gardens in Streatham. From what I can work out there is no Ambleside Gardens in Streatham – but there is most definitely an Ambleside Avenue. It was where Cynthia and Lord Sutch lived – Cynthia’s brothel.

Until Keith Hill won Streatham for Labour, for many years Streatham had been a Tory constituency. Hill’s win was attributed to a boundary change, which resulted in a sizeable part of Brixton, including the town hall, being relocated to the constituency of Streatham. I do not know who will have been responsible for the boundary change – but it certainly presented an opportunity for yet more concealing of the organised abuse of children and associated serious crime.

Whilst searching the internet for info about Keith Hill, an unrelated but topical news report popped up. It mentioned a Baroness Julia Cumberlege who had Chaired the ‘Better Births’ National Maternity Review in 2015. The report featured a nice photo of Cumberlege with some new mums who had all stated that they were delighted with Cumberlege’s recommendations for natural births. Over the last few months there has been an admission that there has been far too much dogma regarding ‘natural birth’ and whilst it is absolutely fine for some women, a number of women have suffered serious injury or have lost their babies because of a reluctance of midwives to intervene. In some cases mothers have died. It was the dogmatic insistence on natural births by a group of aggressive – and incompetent -midwives at Furness General Hospital Cumbria that led to a spate of deaths of babies. The deaths were concealed by the NHS and the sordid truth was only discovered by James Titcombe after his own baby died at the hospital in 2008. James was subsequently invited to contribute to the CQC’s work re patient safety but resigned after facing relentless hostility and rudeness from the midwives associated with the CQC. Cumberlege’s review didn’t take the Cumbria experience into account then.

Julia Cumberlege was given a peerage in 1990 – she sits as a Tory. I don’t know WHY Cumberlege was given a peerage, her wiki simply intriguingly refers to her coming ‘from a medical family’. That usually translates as ‘my dad’s a Top Doctor’.

In 1986 Cumberlege was involved with producing a report which recommended allowing Angels to prescribe certain drugs. In mental health that has been interpreted as giving Angels carte blanche to forcibly drug any patient they feel like – a patient who may for example be questioning them or even complaining about being ‘restrained’ – without seeking another opinion.

After arriving in the Lords, Cumberlege was in 1992 appointed a junior Health Minister. Until 1997 she covered all health and social services matters in the Lords. So she’ll have covered the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, the associated criminality in the mental health services and the commissioning of Dr Dafydd Alun Jones to provide ‘substance abuse services’ for north Wales (see post ‘The Evolution Of A Drugs Baron?’).

Cumberlege was the ‘sponsor Minister’ for Plymouth, responsible for the regeneration and a budget of £45 million pa. Why she was let loose with that sort of money I do not know.

Speaking in the Lords in 2000 Cumberlege recommended replacing the NHS with an insurance premium. She has also promoted the use of private provision within the NHS and suggested that Gov’t should put hospitals under private practice. Note to Cumberlege: Cygnet Healthcare and the Priory are now being commissioned to provide huge swathes of mental health care for NHS patients. There has been scandal after scandal and numerous patient deaths. That is because Cygnet and the Priory are run by the same shite, unscrupulous Top Doctors who previously neglected their NHS patients and concealed criminal misconduct eg. Robert Kehoe, Adrienne Key and Robin Jacobson. Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence paid good money for treatment from the Priory Roehampton. They are both dead, having killed themselves.

In 2010 Cumberlege was awarded an honorary Fellowship by the RCN.
Cumberlege is, among other things: a Trustee of Cancer Research UK; a Senior Associate of the Kings Fund; Secretary of the Dying Well Parliamentary Group; Vice-President of the Royal Society for Public Health; honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians; Vice-President of the Royal College of Nursing and Midwifery; President of Age UK, East Sussex.

Cumberlege is a Roman Catholic. In 2006-07 she Chaired the Commission reviewing the approach of the Catholic Church in England and Wales to child protection. She also spoke at the Catholic Medical Association in Bristol in 2009 – the meeting was officiated by Catholic prelate Archbishop Peter Smith.

Peter Smith is the Metropolitan Archbishop of Southwark. He was Bishop of East Anglia (1995-01) and the Metropolitan Archbishop of Cardiff (2001-10). Peter Smith has a law degree from Exeter University.

Smith was named as Archbishop of Cardiff in the wake of a controversy regarding paedophile priests in the archdiocese. Smith stated that he wanted ‘to help people bind up the wounds and bring healing’.

In 2010 Smith was appointed Metropolitan Archbishop of Southwark. In 2015 Southwark Crown Court heard that Peter Smith was one of two bishops responsible for allowing Father Antony McSweeney to be appointed a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of East Anglia following an incident in 1998 when a housekeeper found porn at McSweeney’s home. Peter Smith treated the matter as one for the church to deal with alone and did not involve the police. Since Smith made that decision, McSweeney was imprisoned for abusing boys at Grafton House children’s home between 1978-81.

Peter Smith has Chaired the Catholic Truth Society since 1993, Chaired the Dept for Christian Responsibility and Citizenship within the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales since 1998 and Chaired the Central Religious Advisory Committee of the BBC and ITC between 2001-04. He was made an honorary Fellow of the University of Wales Lampeter in 2004 and an honorary Fellow of Cardiff University in 2006.

In 2001 Cumberlege set up her own company, Cumberlege Connections Ltd. Her husband Patrick Cumberlege is a Director.

The Cumberleges were in the Courts earlier this year. They are opposing the development of affordable homes in East Sussex, in the village of Newick. The Cumberleges explained to the Court that they are residents of Newick and members of Newick Village Society. Patrick is the former Chairman of Newick Village Society and the Baroness has been a parish, district and County Councillor, ‘representing the village’. And they certainly don’t want riff-raff moving in near them.

In my post ‘Compare And Contrast – The Case Of Two Doctors And The General Medical Council’, I discussed the disciplining of Dr Ann Dally by the GMC for prescribing controlled drugs to addicts in the 1980s. I noted that Dally had been vigorously pursued by the GMC for doing exactly what Dr Dafydd Alun Jones was known to be doing (see post ‘The Evolution Of A Drugs Baron?’), except that Dafydd was facilitating the Westminster Paedophile Ring as well, which afforded him considerable protection from the authorities. I wondered who had been so keen to nail Dally and why even her connections to the Royals – her husband Dr Peter Dally had attended Princess Margaret at the behest of Lord Snowdon – hadn’t been enough to keep her out of trouble. In that post I stated that I would read the book that Ann Dally wrote about it all to see if I could work out what was going on.

I have now read Ann’s book, ‘A Doctor’s Story’, which she finished writing in the late 1980s. I think that I have worked out what was going on and it’s gobsmacking, as are the activities of some of the people involved in the drama.

Ann Dally wrote convincingly about the problems that drug addicts faced when trying to gain treatment, either for their addiction or anything else. She stated bluntly that doctors hated addicts, that psychiatrists usually refused to treat them and that in the 1980s some GPs surgeries even had notices up stating that they would not treat addicts. She stated that psychiatrists took the view that addicts should be disposed of within the prison system and that if a female addict became pregnant social services usually removed their child as a matter of routine. All this is true. I heard these opinions of addicts being openly articulated by people when I worked in the London medical schools in the late 1980s/90s. I was told by a number of people working in the NHS in north Wales that the reason why Dr Dafydd Alun Jones was given the remit for treating all the addicts in the region was that the other psychiatrists all refused to treat them.

However I also knew from my friendship with a man who had been a drug abuser himself that addicts will speak highly of any doctor who gives them drugs – they do not care about anything else other than securing the drugs. This is not merely my interpretation of what I saw, the former drug user told me this himself. I also witnessed him tell one of the nurses at the Hergest Unit this everyday story of drug using folk. Both this man and I were objecting to Dafydd Alun Jones being allowed into the Hergest Unit in the face of so many allegations of his serious misconduct and in the wake of the serious complaints that I had made about him going completely uninvestigated. The nurse tried to defend the Hergest Unit by saying ‘those patients want to see him, they like him’, to which my friend responded ‘of course they like him, he gives them drugs and I should know because I used to be like that myself’. Both I and this man heard addicts openly boasting that Dafydd was great because ‘he’ll give you anything you want’.

The medical treatment of addicts became a hot potato in the 1980s. There had been an ideological change driven by a very influential, indeed overtly powerful part of the medical establishment. Until the mid-1970s, Drug Dependency Units (DDUs) in NHS hospitals prescribed maintenance therapy for addicts – in other words opiate substitutes such as methadone were prescribed without ever asking the addict to withdraw. The addicts were given repeat prescriptions for the same (sometimes high) dose for as long as they requested it. Prescribing was often very generous and cocktails involving stimulants and depressants were frequently prescribed. Addicts could also be prescribed heroin and cocaine if the doctor saw fit to do so. A lot of addicts – and doctors like Ann Dally – argued that this was by far the best approach, that the actual drug itself did little harm and that the real problems were caused by what addicts did to get the drugs if they couldn’t receive them on prescription. It was established that addicts turned to crime to acquire the money to buy drugs, that they lived in terrible conditions because their time and money was spent in pursuit of drugs and nothing else, that they acquired blood borne infections through sharing needles with other people and that their lives descended into chaos. Dally et al argued that addicts could actually live productive lives that were indistinguishable from non-addicts if they were prescribed maintenance drugs. There was evidence that for some addicts this was true. From the latter half of the 1970s, there was great pressure from certain parts of the medical establishment on NHS DDUs not to provide maintenance doses, but to instead make it a condition of treatment that addicts must withdraw – quite quickly as well – and become completely drug-free. Eventually very few DDUs would actually provide maintenance therapy, so in the 1980s an increasing number of addicts began seeking out doctors in private practice who would prescribe maintenance therapy – obviously this was a service that addicts had to pay for. It hadn’t previously been an issue because when NHS clinics had prescribed freely and generously, addicts had less to gain by going to a private practice.

Ann Dally alleged that the driver for the refusal to prescribe maintenance therapy was coming from the ‘Maudsley Mafia’, a small group of psychiatrists in teaching hospitals like the Maudsley who were incredibly powerful. Why they wanted to push through this change to clinical practice is open to debate. Work published since that time states that very little was actually known about drug dependence and how to treat it, even by the specialist NHS DDUs, so people were just floundering about in the dark. Dr Thomas Bewley, President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and allegedly a drug dependency expert, was to say later that ‘no-one had the faintest idea of what they were doing and were all expected to solve the problem of drug dependence’. There seems to have been a lot of truth in this confession.

It has been widely speculated that the change in clinical practice resulted from Margaret Thatcher’s administrations doing as they were asked by the US administrations at that time, when the Reagan and later Bush were holding their much publicised ‘War On Drugs’. Thatcher was so keen to maintain the ‘special relationship’ that she simply went along with US policy. Whatever the reason, by the mid-80s there was very great pressure on the private doctors who had been prescribing maintenance therapy not to do so anymore, so doctors who did prescribe found themselves greatly in demand. Something though was not working, because by the mid-80s, drug use was increasing greatly, even in provincial areas like north Wales. The advent of HIV-AIDS increased the problems of intravenous drug-users and provided an extra layer of complexity.

Until 2007, the Drugs Branch in the Home Office were responsible for monitoring controlled drugs and Home Office Drugs Inspectors visited doctors prescribing controlled drugs at least once every two years. If doctors were thought to be prescribing irresponsibly, under the Misuse of Drugs Act (1967) they could find themselves called by the Home Office before a Tribunal, which could remove their powers to prescribe controlled drugs. They could then be referred to the GMC – although this rarely happened. Doctors wanting to prescribe certain drugs needed a Home Office licence.

I remember the growing problem of drug use in north Wales at the time. In 1984 the corrupt GP Dr D.G.E. Wood – who was concealing the wrongdoing of Dafydd et al – told me that ‘heroin is now a local problem’. Dafydd himself was appearing at public meetings dispensing his wisdom concerning the problem and there was much ranting in the local newspapers and on Welsh TV. In north Wales a lot of people got very excited and did not seem to be able to distinguish occasional cannabis users from heroin and cocaine addicts. Just to confuse matters, it became clear that there was a big problem with police corruption, especially in drug squads. I witnessed a bit of this in north Wales – the corrupt officers were busy pursuing students and hippies and if necessary planting drugs on them, whilst organised criminals involved in importing and distributing drugs were left to carry on doing business. I knew that the same thing was happening in the west country and in Manchester and it will no doubt have been happening in London. What I knew about in Bangor though was poor people taking drugs – people on the council estates in Caernarfon, Bangor or Holyhead, or in rural locations such as Anglesey.

Ann Dally’s patients were rather different. Ann and Peter Dally were society doctors. They both came from privileged families themselves and trained at St Thomas’s, which is considered to be the medical school of the privileged classes. Ann Dally’s own account explains that they were both completely committed to the NHS – they qualified very soon after the establishment of the NHS – and never expected to move into private practice. As a young doctor Peter Dally worked as a psychiatrist under the dreadful Dr William Sargant at St Thomas’s and built up his private practice when Sargant went away for a few months and Peter Dally took over his patients for him. Sargant returned, but Dally found himself in such demand that he began renting consulting room space in the same building as Sargant. Dally was a consultant at Westminster Hospital as well, but eventually found that he didn’t have time to do both the NHS work at Westminster and his private work, so he gave up the NHS work. Ann Dally had a lot of children and began her family soon after qualifying, so she worked in Family Planning clinics and did work with women and children, because that fitted around her family. She moved into private work through ‘helping Peter’ with his practice.

Ann Dally writes very convincingly as a compassionate doctor who is angered by suffering and injustice. There are inconsistencies though. Although at one point she mentions that she only ever went into private work because the NHS did not reach up to the idealistic expectations that she had of it, she maintains that she rarely met anyone working in the NHS who was cruel to patients or malicious and that no-one working in the NHS was judgemental. Dally’s story is that EVERYONE was working for the benefit of the patients, even if they had their foibles or clashed with their colleagues. Yet she provides first hand anecdotes of appalling practice. As a very junior doctor working in obstetrics, she has a patient in labour whose condition is such that she will die if a caesarean is performed – although there is concern about the baby. Dally is faced with a senior registrar who is a devout Roman Catholic and wants to perform the caesarean to save the baby, although he knows this will kill the mother. Dally is so horrified that she goes to seek help from a higher authority and gets a grade A bollocking for having brought the unfortunate views of the senior registrar into the light of day – although everyone knew that he was about to kill a patient. A fudge is undertaken, the senior registrar is persuaded to go elsewhere for a few hours whilst someone takes over the care of the woman in labour, preventing a murder. It is made clear to Dally that much embarrassment has been caused and that she must never interfere in such a manner again. Again and again Dally recounts tales of patients being treated appallingly, of psychiatry having such a poor reputation that good medical graduates run away from it screaming, of mad incompetent sadistic psychiatrists who have no idea of what they are doing, of ‘research’ in psychiatry that was laughable and of realising that if she is looking after someone with psychiatric problems she needs to do her best to ensure that they aren’t ever admitted to a mental hospital (particularly Tooting Bec). As for never meeting anyone malicious working in the NHS – she witnesses a young woman who had taken an overdose being deliberately sent to the back of the queue in casualty by the nurse on duty ‘to teach her a lesson’. The delay in treatment is such that the young woman dies. Documentation is then altered to conceal the delay in treatment. The coroner knows what happened but he colludes and asks no questions.

Dally maintains that when she was working in obstetrics and gynaecology, most beds were taken by women who were in need of treatment following illegal abortions. I have been told this by others who worked in the NHS in the 1950s, it’s one reason why so many staff welcomed the 1967 Abortion Act. However Dally admits to something that I have never heard or indeed read before. That at St Thomas’s there were at least two consultants openly performing illegal abortions – and a lot of them. Dally knew all about it because she assisted them – because they had identified her as a junior doctor who would agree to help them with this task. Dally must presume that her readers are complete ignoramuses – she breezily explained that they were not breaking the law. They were. I understand what the law was at that time and Dally and her colleagues were breaking it in a very big way. Dally also mentions a Professor Dugald Baird who performed abortions on ‘any women who didn’t want to have babies’, stating that this was legal. No, it was not. I am very glad that the law changed and I can understand the sympathy that Dally and her colleagues had for those women with unwanted pregnancies, but that lot were completely flouting the law and they will have known it. So who was Professor Dugald Baird? He was one of the most ‘distinguished’ names in obstetrics and gynaecology at the time and had a Chair at the University of Aberdeen. He was a pioneer in Family Planning Clinics. His son Professor David Tennant Baird was instrumental in gaining approval for the ‘morning after pill’ RU-486 to be made available in the UK. Dugald Baird’s other son, D. Euan Baird, before he retired in 2003 was Chair and CEO of Schlumberger, the biggest oilfields service company in the world. Ann would probably describe it as a wind farm. The Baird Family Hospital in Aberdeen, named after Dugald and his clan, is due to open in 2020.

So Ann was capable of bending the rules, reassuring everyone that she was not, denying some real horrors which led to disastrous results for patients and giving a good impression throughout all this that she was a radical, caring doctor who only had the best interests of her patients at heart.

Ann Dally became famous for her clashes with the GMC over her prescribing for addicts, but there’s a few lines in the book that point to a other problems as well. Dally did a great deal of work in what she calls ‘medical journalism’ and ordinary ‘journalism’ when she was young to earn money. She stresses that she was always very careful never to accept patients who had contacted her on the basis of articles of hers that they had read, because that would contravene the GMC rules on advertising. So if they did contact her, she sent them off back to their GP – who then referred them to her anyway. OK, I can see how that could be constructed as adhering to the rules, but as a youngish doctor Ann was investigated when an article that she wrote turned up in a porn magazine no less. Ann’s story was that someone had sold an article on gynaecology ‘behind her back’. So what the hell was in that article? I have read numerous books and articles on obstetrics and gynaecology and they really are not written in the style or indeed in the language that a reader of a porn magazine would be interested in or in which most of them would even understand. Particularly articles dating from the 1960s. Even work by the likes of Masters and Johnson which was considered explicit and most controversial would have had difficulty appealing to soft pornographers. Ann doesn’t explain in her book how she ended up being investigated – she only mentions it because when she first trots off to get advice re the charges of irresponsible prescribing, one of the legal advisors from the MDU remembers her from twenty years previously, from the case with the porn mag.

So after witnessing no-one ever misbehaving themselves in the NHS, Ann and Peter went into private practice in the early 1960s. They began by practicing from their family home in Dulwich – it was only some years later that they purchased a lease on a building in one of the most prestigious locations in Harley Street. But business booms at Dulwich. Ann mentions that Peter has some very ‘grand’ patients. Although they are running an extensive private practice they do not have a secretary or ‘anything official’. The children are taught how to answer the phone and the kids are also told that if they do answer the phone and it’s someone who says they are ringing from Buckingham Palace, the children must not think it’s a joke because it will be someone ringing from Buckingham Palace. Ann mentions that one does not charge a fee when one treats Royalty, one has to be available at any time of the day or night and one must treat them in secret. Ann finds treating the Royals a bit of a pain, but it does wonders for one’s reputation. As well as the Royal Family, Ann mentions that their patients included holders of accounts at Coutts, aristocrats, heirs to famous family fortunes, City brokers, property developers, writers, musicians, senior people from the BBC, journalists, solicitors, pop stars and civil servants and the families of these people. She mentions that they have international patients including many Arabs, and have treated the children of some of the wealthiest and most publicised people. One of her patients was a princess from a Gulf state and Ann goes to visit her at the Wellington Hospital. A suite of rooms has been booked for relatives, ladies-in-waiting and servants – as well as a group of ‘pubescent girls’ dressed identically, whom the translator explains to Ann are ‘slave girls from Nubia’. Ann observes that she’s never met slaves before. One of Ann’s patients was a Cabinet Minister who was ‘raving mad and almost naked, chasing his boyfriend around the clinic’. Ann was called to attend another patient who was a fraudster who ‘went mad’ in an hotel whilst developing up a huge scam – another psychiatrist who was initially called to deal with him had tried to become a partner in the scam. It was left to Ann to save the day. She remarks drily that the GMC never got to hear about this. So she didn’t report any of it then.

The most worry anecdote regarding the Dallys’ interesting patients though is one about a retired Army officer. He had consulted Peter Dally after he had amputated his own leg at the knee and couldn’t explain why he had done this. An ’eminent psychiatrist’ had paid them all a visit at the Dallys’ place but no-one could find anything wrong with the retired officer. With Peter’s therapeutic skills though, they eventually got to the truth. The retired officer ‘had a fantasy’ that his mission in life was to model artificial limbs and have sexual relationships with amputees. As he was now getting on in years, he felt that it was time to ‘put his fantasy into practice’. Police had found literature from artificial limb suppliers in his house and they had founds stacks of anatomy and surgery textbooks which contained detailed instructions on how to perform amputations. The Dallys’ noticed that their patient had made a very good job of his own amputation.

I think that I know what had been going on and it wasn’t what the Dallys’ claimed. Amputating limbs is a highly skilled business, one needs to be shown how to do it, one needs to practice and one needs the right drugs and equipment. Diagrams in surgery books, even the best ones, don’t look anything like the unholy mess that one is faced with if one cuts oneself open. You need to learn from someone who already knows and you need to learn how to interpret surgery manuals as well. That retired officer had operated previously, probably quite often. And someone trained in surgery had taught him. He almost certainly had an amputee fetish – I can’t remember the word for the syndrome now, but it is recognised – and he had been amputating other people’s limbs as well as his own in order to have sex with them. And he was obviously supplying the prosthetics as well. The Dallys had discovered a very worrying situation there. Not that there is a word about how they resolved it, let alone who taught the retired officer to operate or who supplied him with the drugs etc necessary. It’s just written up as an example of ‘people do the funniest things’.

Ann and Peter are acutely aware of how discreet they must be when they are dealing with very rich law breaking patients, particularly those who are famous or in public life. Ann explains that a psychiatric diagnosis must be avoided at all costs and freely admits that lies are told and elaborate pantomimes are set up with other Top Doctors and hospitals. Ann explains that a statement is sent out to the press explaining that the person concerned is going into hospital for medical or surgical problem – heart, kidney or whatever – and a surgeon or physician is sent in through the front door of the hospital to have a few words with the reporters, whilst the psychiatrist goes in through the back entrance.

So the Dallys must have had a reputation as being pretty useful if you were filthy rich and either up to something embarrassing or unlawful. No wonder their practice was so popular.

Not only would you have needed much dosh to have afforded to consult Ann Dally if you were a drug addict, but you would have needed to prove it. Ann didn’t treat plebs. Or people who looked dirty or unkempt or anyone rude or aggressive or even anyone that her secretaries (by the time that she was treating addicts she was employing secretaries) ‘didn’t like’. She asked for income tax returns and pay slips to show that you could afford to pay. Not only did you have to pay Ann (she helpfully details her prices for prescriptions in the book), but you had to pay the chemist too. Furthermore, if you were a patient of Ann’s you had to only go to one of the chemists that was on the list that she gave you, for some reason you couldn’t just go to any old chemist – although that would have been quite legal. Ann states that she very much prefers working with intelligent patients and that she didn’t treat anyone who was psychotic because treating such patients caused her so much anxiety. They also need looking after and can’t just be sent out of the door with a prescription.

If you had the money to pay – and of course the money for designer clothes so people who were very obviously addicts popping in to pick up their scripts didn’t actually look as though they were – Ann certainly provided a good service. She got the social services off your back if you were a parent who was in danger of having your kids removed and she undertook medico-legal work as well, having a ‘moral obligation’ to go to Court ‘for a patient who needed my help’. Ann would even turn up to a Court case the very next day if necessary – presumably if the Royal had been arrested and had found themselves in the cells waiting to appear before the Magistrates for the first hearing – and she’d cancel everything and if necessary travel many miles if the Court case was outside of London. Ann also doubled up as Santa – she kept a drawer full of gifts for older children who were visiting the dealer with their parents and the children were allowed to choose a gift on every visit. Ann observed that it made her very popular with the children. So they’d obviously say the right thing to the social services or the judge.

Truly a Dafydd for the upper classes and rich and famous!

Ann does tell the truth at times in her book re drug addiction – again, it’s when she describes some of the grim practices of the NHS drug clinics. She relates that the ‘detoxing’ that the clinics forced on people was no more than a box-ticking exercise, that drugs were freely available in these clinics on the black market, that addicts took them and that the staff knew about this but nothing was said as long as the patients weren’t caught doing it. The clinics wanted to pretend that the patients were detoxing successfully because the clinic would then boast of their success, the patients went along with the charade because they had often been sent to the clinic as an alternative to prison and although the care provided by the clinics was very poor and neglect was the order of the day, the patients preferred being in hospital to prison. The patients would then be discharged as ‘drug free’ no matter what sort of state they were in. Some of the UK’s ‘leading authorities’ in drug dependency presided over clinics like this.

This description of Dally’s pretty much equates to everything that I ever heard about Dafydd’s ‘drug unit’ at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh.

So although Dally was no doubt quite correct in her descriptions of the loathing that nearly all doctors had for addicts and the very poor ‘care’ that they received from the few psychiatrists who would agree to treat them, there was something about her practices that caused the GMC to haul her up before them three times over a period of a few years, whereas they nearly always left it to the Home Office alone to deal with ‘irresponsible prescribing’. I have mentioned that Dally attributed her problems to a group of powerful doctors in the medical establishment who really had it in for her, although their own clinics were very mediocre, corners were cut and rules and laws were flouted. Dally was definitely clashing with certain Top Doctors, although some of them were so obnoxious it would be difficult not to clash with them. She did have a lot of support though – from a number of other high profile Top Doctors and from swathes of the liberal media who really did take the view that she had been wronged. At the time there was acres written about her case along with the cases of Dr Wendy Savage and Dr Marietta Higgs, who also clashed with the higher echelons of the medical establishment in the mid 80s.

The common theme was that these were three ‘powerful women doctors’ and the misogynist old gits who ran medicine just couldn’t bear strong wimmin, so the boys’ club went after them. I believe that this is a misreading. The cases of these three women were all completely different – although Wendy Savage and Ann Dally supported each other and were quite friendly. (Wendy Savage wrote the foreword to Ann’s book.) The lay press interpreted the Savage case as Mrs Savage being a female, feminist, Labour Party supporting Top Doctor who was encouraging childbirth with less medical intervention than most of the allegedly Tory hi-tech birth supporting male colleagues surrounding her. But there were plenty of Top Doctors who weren’t Tories, plenty of ones with an interest in low-intervention births and even a few who liked to think of themselves as feminists. And lots of younger female obstetricians were in training. It was common knowledge in London that Wendy Savage and the Professor of her department hated each other, had done so for a very long time and a civil war had broken out. He saw his chance and put the boot in and tried to get rid of her. Dr Marietta Higgs had caused havoc in Cleveland for the local hospital by removing hundreds of children from their parents on the grounds that she believed that they had been anally raped. She had so many kids taken into care that foster homes couldn’t be found for them all and they were placed in the local paediatric wards. There were no beds left for sick children, parents were protesting on hospital premises, writs were flying and chaos had broken out. This happened as Alison Taylor, Mary Wynch and I were writing to politicians and Ministers raising the alarm about events in north Wales – I have previously speculated that Cleveland provided a very useful distraction to allegations in north Wales that children were being sexually abused by the social services themselves and that there seemed to be a widespread network of professionals colluding with this. I have no idea whether Marietta Higgs really believed that all those children had been abused or not – she certainly won’t have been a worse doctor for being a woman, but if somebody wanted to manipulate her in the way that I suspect that they did, being a woman will have been a bonus. After all, women are caring and could never be colluding with or concealing the organised abuse of children could they? It’s why female social workers, Top Doctors and Angels were repeatedly told by Dafydd et al to tell the police that I’d threatened them or that they were terrified of me – it looks better coming from a Woman In Fear.

The case of Ann Dally was completely different from either Wendy Savage or Marietta Higgs. It was also driven by a rather different group of people, although the public scrap was among Top Doctors. From what I can gather from Ann Dally’s book, it was the police who very much wanted to nail her.

The police were so keen to demonstrate that Ann Dally was up to no good that they routinely questioned drug addicts in London as to whether they knew Ann Dally or if any of their friends knew her, they sent officers undercover who then purchased drugs from patients of Ann’s, former police officers were employed as private detectives to investigate the chemists to which she sent her patients and at one point Scotland Yard held an investigation into her. Paperwork from her accountant was examined -although that had been at the request of one of Dally’s barristers in an attempt to help her – and all of her financial affairs were probed. There was an attempt to bring a charge of deception against Ann.

The results were varied. One of Ann’s patients claimed that the police drafted his statement implicating her and he just signed it. One undercover officer did succeed in purchasing drugs from one of Dally’s patients. When prescriptions were examined it was discovered that Dally had been prescribing very generously for a lot of people. Dally herself talked of ‘1000s’ of addicts phoning or dropping in at her house. By Dally’s own admission, no-one could understand her accounts – not even her and Peter (Ann and Peter divorced in 1979 but remained on good terms and continued to run the practice together). Her rationale for this was that their accountant was unbeknown to them an alcoholic who was having a nervous breakdown. The Dallys were psychiatrists who specialised in addiction problems – were they too busy with Princess Margaret to notice their poor accountant disintegrating in front of them? I mentioned in my post ‘Compare And Contrast – The Case Of Two Doctors And The General Medical Council’ that the property owned and lifestyle enjoyed by Ann Dally as described by the GMC wasn’t that different from that enjoyed by many Harley Street Top Doctors at the time – they all trousered a lot of money. However, I note that in Ann’s book she states that a police officer was alleged to have made a comment to one of Ann’s patients about the amount of money that she must be making after he’d performed a few calculations. The police often get things badly wrong but one thing that the police are very good at is spotting when people seem to be in possession of a rather more money than one would expect, I’ve been very impressed with the police’s talent in this area. This morning someone who knew that I was researching the Dally case mentioned that there was cash stashed everywhere, not just in the Dallys’ bank account. It seemed to be complaints and questions sparked off by the police that landed Ann in trouble on each occasion.

One of Ann’s patients ended up in the secure prison on the Isle of Wight serving a three year stretch for supplying drugs. This man had been referred to Ann by a GP who ‘was under threat from the Home Office’ and who didn’t want to prescribe for him anymore. The patient had been an addict for many, many years, had a criminal record and told Ann that he was interested in qualifying as a social worker – he was undertaking a preliminary course at Coventry Poly and had been receiving treatment from a doctor at the Poly. Ann explains in her book that he had ‘exploited’ the ‘drug doctors’ of the 60s, Lady Frankau and Dr Petro and had received huge quantities of drugs from them. Lady Isabella Frankau and Petro were legendary. Frankau was acknowledged as being the mainstay of the flourishing illicit heroin market in the early 1960s – the Home Office considered her very harmful. She also prescribed cocaine and told other doctors to do this, which led to a cocaine market developing. Her prescribing was so bizarre as to be indefensible. Frankau was basically a drug dealer to high society. Petro was struck off. Ann’s patient who had previously acquired his goodies from Frankau and Petro also broke into the surgery of the doctor from Coventry Poly. I don’t know what his excuse for doing that was, but he told Ann that he hadn’t been supplying drugs, one of his friends was suffering from withdrawal symptoms so he’d lent him some drugs.

I have mentioned that the Home Office Drugs Branch were responsible for inspecting and monitoring doctors prescribing controlled drugs. Ann seemed to have a remarkably friendly relationship with some of those Inspectors, although she noticed that as the 1980s rolled on, the Inspectors were getting tougher and tougher on prescribing doctors. The Chief Inspector of the Drugs Branch between 1977 until his retirement in 1986 was Bing Spear. He had first entered the Drugs Branch of the Home Office in 1952 as an Inspector and was Deputy Chief Inspector between 1965-77. Bing Spear seems to have lingered on in the memories of many people who had doings with the world of addiction before he retired. He was of course a civil servant, but he seems to have been quite an unusual one. Spear had an excellent knowledge of the doctors working in drug dependency – he will have definitely known Dafydd – as well as of the voluntary bodies, Gov’t officials, police and customs officers. He also spent a lot of time mixing with addicts in the West End and personally knew nearly all of them. Not only that, but he knew who the dealers who initially had sold them drugs were, how long they’d been addicts, where there current supplies were coming from and who their current girlfriends were. He was known to be good friends with a number of addicts and would even turn up with them to attend the seminars of Prof Arnold Trebach – an American ‘legalise all drugs’ campaigner – when Trebach was in London. Bing was famous for being someone whom the addicts could go to ‘for help’. Bing’s stated ambition after he retired was to run an addicts union and ‘get the addicts organised’. (Dally was also enthusiastic about addicts establishing their own groups to lobby for their rights – she assisted in setting up one such group and her sons provided the group with free office space.) Bing was not a drugs outreach worker, he was a civil service Mandarin.

Bing Spear didn’t just prove helpful to addicts, Ann Dally really rated him too. He made it known that he ‘didn’t like’ the NHS DDUs and ‘encouraged’ Ann in her work with addicts. It was Bing who first warned Ann about the ‘mafia’ of Top Doctors working in drugs dependency – Bing was good enough to give Ann the names of those involved and provide her with the low-down on their techniques. It was also Bing who warned her when the mafia had their knives out for her. Ann’s first encounter with Bing was interesting. As her business boomed, she rang Bing for advice and was told by him that he had been waiting for her to ring because he thought that she’d need his help.

Bing certainly stuck his neck out on behalf of Ann. Ann maintained that the Top Doctors who condemned her were an ‘amorphous powerful’ group, comprised mostly of London DDU consultants, supported by a few others outside of London. Bing publicly identified the group in an interview in New Statesman. They had a number of connections with the Royal Colleges and the GMC and were especially influential because they had the confidence of David Mellor, the Minister at the Home Office. Mellor frequently appeared on TV explaining how he was ‘determined to beat the evil’ of drugs.

Ann got on very well with Bing’s colleague John Lawson as well – Lawson was the Senior Home Office Inspector for Drugs for London and the South East. Bing and Lawson were usually the Inspectors who visited Ann. As the authorities clamped down more and more on the prescribing of controlled drugs – and pursued Ann – by 1985 John Lawson had been transferred to Bristol, where he was responsible for the South West and Wales. Ann’s perception was that Lawson had been transferred because he was ‘too soft’ on doctors and the Home Office wanted a ‘hardliner’ in his place. But Lawson wasn’t demoted – he was transferred and given responsibility for WALES. So at the time that Dafydd was building up his empire in north Wales, John Lawson, a notoriously soft Inspector where questionable prescribing was concerned was transferred to Wales – where he would be responsible for inspecting and monitoring one Dr Dafydd Alun Jones.

Bing Spear retired in 1986, although Ann’s book suggests that he resigned, supposedly out of disgust at the way that her colleague Dr John Marks was being treated. Long before he retired however, Bing was in poor health. Ann talks of him as being ‘yellow’ and having to go into hospital frequently for extended stays because of his heart and kidney troubles – there was usually a crisis when this happened because once Bing was indisposed, unfortunate things would happen to Ann at the hands of the authorities and Bing wouldn’t be there to fix it.

As I read the accounts of Bing and his somewhat unusual lifestyle for the most senior civil servant in the Home Office Drugs Branch, I couldn’t help wondering if perhaps Bing dabbled in a bit of chemical recreation himself. He hated the mafia who were restricting the supply of controlled drugs, didn’t seem too keen on helping the police or even his own colleagues in the Home Office, provided mountains of helpful advice and warnings to Ann when people were about to launch an investigation into her and he was a yellow colour and had extended stays in hospital. We know from Ann’s own account that some of her patients were civil servants and that if such folk had to be admitted to hospital for drug or psychiatric problems a pack of lies was told and it was all blamed on medical or surgical problems.

Ann Dally ended up appearing in front of the GMC on three separate occasions, on a number of charges. She was never struck off but was suspended and at one point banned from prescribing controlled drugs for 14 months – she appealed against the decision but lost the appeal. Her view was that until the early 1980s the GMC adopted a rather benign attitude to doctors treating addicts as well as to many other matters. Ann felt that their attitude changed ‘with a vengeance’ after Lord John Richardson retired as President – the GMC became much more of a prosecuting body and began hiring prosecutors, some with Old Bailey experience, in order to secure convictions against doctors.

The GMC were going through a torrid time during the years in which they were demanding Ann’s presence in front of the fitness to practice committee. There was public dissatisfaction with them because doctors were just never removed no matter how gross or lethal their misconduct – it was at this time that complaints were pouring into the GMC about Dafydd Alun Jones but there was zilch action taken – but doctors too were rising up against the GMC. The source of the doctors’ dissatisfaction was the GMC’s request a few years previously for an annual fee in order to retain their registration with the GMC. Doctors went ape and – among junior doctors in particular – there was a mass rebellion. Dr Michael O’Donnell – who was by then working as a full time journalist rather than a doctor – was a key figure in organising the revolt which resulted in O’Donnell being voted onto the GMC committee and then thousands of doctors refusing to pay their fee to the GMC. The GMC threatened to strike them all off and Keith Joseph, the then Secretary of State for Health, had kittens at the prospect of a shortfall of doctors in the public workforce. He set up a Public Inquiry Chaired by the nuclear physicist Sir Alec Merrison in order to try to placate the Top Doctors. Michael O’Donnell remained on the GMC committee and was as difficult as he could be. He was sympathetic to Dally – he had been a student at Tommy’s with her – and at the beginning of one of the hearings into her fitness to practice he walked out of the committee and did not return. Although O’Donnell was known for making those sorts of gestures.

Ann Dally did a number of things after she was banned from prescribing that confirmed the suspicions of those who believed that she was a purveyor of drugs. After the sentence was announced, there was a short lag before it actually came into effect – Dally had to receive written notification before it was effective. So she went back to Harley Street and literally churned out prescriptions until the very second that she was legally prevented from doing so. It was rather like the last day of the sales. It transpired that Dally had been confused about the rules and that she actually could have spent a few more hours dishing out the goodies. She only found out about this when she was told by a worker in a drugs organisation – she was on very good terms with these bodies as well – that her addicts had all complained about her because she could have prescribed for longer than she did.

As my friend observed re Dafydd – of course they like him, he gives them drugs…

Ann’s fan club dwindled quite suddenly when she was no longer dispensing. She made another little slip though – she did stop prescribing opiates but she continued to prescribe other controlled drugs. She was caught and a lot of people were very cross. Her supporters feared that this was it, she would now be struck off, although amazingly enough she wasn’t. Ann’s story was that she ‘didn’t know’ the drugs that she prescribed were on the controlled list. Which would seem to be an inexplicable lack of knowledge for a specialist in addiction who is being monitored by the Home Office – particularly one who had just been suspended by the GMC for irresponsible prescribing.

The fate of some of Ann’s patients after she could no longer treat them could be used to support either her view of good clinical practice or her opponents. A number of them were caught dealing and ended up in prison, some were involved in other criminal offences and some of them sadly died. There were indications that some of her patients were rather less vulnerable and knew how to survive in the big bad world. To illustrate how important it was for her to be allowed to continue to prescribe whatever her addicts requested, Ann Dally recounted anecdotes of them saying things like ‘oh well I’ll just have to commit a robbery then’. One man explained immediately that he’d return to Pakistan and begin importing heroin. Another patient was a ‘local authority worker with the elderly’ – presumably a social worker or similar – and told Ann that his elderly patients trusted him and had confided in him where they had hidden money and valuables. This man told Ann that if she were to stop prescribing and he was left without his fix, he didn’t think that he’d be able to resist turning the old folk’s houses over. Dally claims that she knew that a number of her patients did make arrangements to turn to serious crime.

In the aftermath of Ann Dally’s suspension there was substantial media interest both in her case and in the debate regarding the best way of treating drug addicts. She made TV and radio appearances and a flurry of articles in the press were published. The publicity surrounding her own particular case eventually died down, but the treatment of drug addicts remained problematic. Dr John Marks, who ran a clinic in Widnes on Merseyside, also treated addicts using maintenance therapy. Unlike Dally, Marks had the support of the police – the Cheshire police carried out some fairly sound research and concluded that there had been a huge decrease in drug-related crime as a consequence of Dr Marks’ practice. Dealers also stopped frequenting the area because there was no demand for their wares. Dr Marks’ locality was one of the few areas in the UK where there was no HIV-AIDS cases at all. Nonetheless, Dr Marks’ clinic was closed down by sleight of hand – a local authority reorganisation took place which led to the disappearance of his Health Authority and thus his clinic. Dr Marks emigrated to New Zealand. A previous post describes how Dr John Marks wanted to relocate to north Wales but Gwynedd Health Authority blocked his appointment on the grounds that he was ‘controversial’. They gave the contract for substance abuse services to Dafydd Alun Jones instead.

So that’s an overview of the Ann Dally case. As ever, if we really want to shed light on the more interesting aspects of it all, we need to take a look at those who played leading roles in the drama, including both those who supported Dally and those who opposed her.

Dally knew influential people and public figures from her earliest days. She was from a well-known family and Marie Stopes was among the family’s friends. She was at Somerville College with Margaret Thatcher – although they weren’t friends – and scores of people whom she studied with at Tommy’s became big names in medicine. She was of course taught by many big names in medicine. We have seen the sort of patients whom she treated – even the most modest of them were solidly middle class and affluent and some were members of the Royal Family. Someone like Ann Dally would be able to muster a great deal of support when they encountered difficulties of any sort. I suspect that the fact that so many of her friends and patients worked in the media may have been responsible for much of the sympathetic coverage that her case received.

Although Dally and her mates didn’t seem to like Thatcher at all when they were at Oxford, when in 1983 Dally was invited to Downing Street in her capacity as an ‘expert’ in drug dependency to meet Thatcher, she clearly felt that she would be in a position to influence her. Dally seemed to have changed her view about Thatcher once Thatcher became PM. She had previously thought that Thatcher was rather boring and not really worth spending time with – shortly after Thatcher was elected as an MP, Thatcher had been invited to a gathering of Somerville Alumni to give a talk. The talk had been so yawningly dull that afterwards people demanded that Thatcher never be invited back again. But now that she was PM Dally saw qualities that had been well-concealed. Dally thought that she was making headway with Thatcher, but she did detect a certain frostiness from the other person present at their meeting – Dr Pamela Mason, whom Dally describes as the Senior Doctor at the Drugs Branch of the DHSS.

I have found a copy of the Bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists from Dec 1985, summarising Parliamentary News, Feb-July 1985. This document was compiled by this blog’s old friend Professor Robert Bluglass, the man who concealed the criminal activities of Dafydd et al in north Wales in 1988! There are loads of names from the past mentioned in this document, one of which was Dr Pamela Mason’s. Mason is described as being the Director of the Mental Health Division in the DHSS. Things were certainly not going well in the Mental Health Division. Not only was Pamela presiding over the chaos and criminality in the north Wales mental health service, but this Bulletin reminded me of a few other problems from that time.

John Patten MP, a Minister in the DHSS, had announced that the DHSS was funding three studies into solvent abuse. One of those studies was to be undertaken by Professor R.H. Anderson at that den of corruption, St George’s Hospital Medical School. In 1985 Oliver Brooke who was later imprisoned for the possession of huge quantities of child porn was still employed as the Professor of Paediatrics at St George’s. The rest of the crooks who covered up for Dafydd et al in 1990/91 were busy down there as well.

The Bulletin mentions that David Mellor of the Home Office announced that there were no plans to increase the level of medical cover and no intention to provide special counselling and advisory services for self-harming prisoners in Holloway. Holloway at that time had a terrible reputation – there were scores of women in there whom everyone acknowledged had serious mental health problems and histories of abuse who were constantly injuring and killing themselves. The response to this was to drug them up to the eye-balls – which was clearly going to continue after Mellor’s statement. There was one part of Holloway that was too embarrassing even for Thatcher’s Home Office though. The Bulletin tells us that the Holloway Project Committee – which included Dr Pamela Mason – is to review the role and future of Holloway (Holloway was eventually closed but it took until very recently for that to happen). Lord Glenarthur -a previous star of this blog – stated that the Gov’t accepted the Report from the Committee that C1 Unit for ‘disturbed women prisoners’ was not meeting the needs of the inmates within. Glenarthur confirmed that there would be an urgent reassessment and immediate steps to improve conditions at the unit. C1 Unit was notorious – it was known as the ‘muppet house’ amongst the prisoners and contained scores of prisoners whom everybody accepted should never have been in prison, were severely mentally ill but somehow were never transferred to hospital. The other prisoners would hear the wails and screams from the muppet house day and night and suicides were common there. The muppet house will have contained many women who will have been abused as kids in care or by the mental health services – which is probably why Holloway had such trouble finding beds for the muppets in psychiatric hospitals. Just look what the Top Doctors were up to – a lot of those muppets will have been destroyed by the Top Doctors themselves because they’d witnessed or suffered a few things that the Top Doctors and others were desperate to keep quiet.

The Bulletin contains an interesting little bit about Wales. In May 1985 the Secretary of State for Wales stated that all Health Authorities, Local Authorities and Family Practitioner Committees were required to form Committees which included representatives of the voluntary sector to provide services for mental illness. So MIND were now officially part of the landscape of ‘service’ provision – the MIND which was at the time also colluding with the criminal activities in north Wales, whilst Tessa Jowell and William Bingley held senior positions there. The Secretary of State for Wales referred to was Nicholas Edwardes, now Lord Crickhowell. Edwardes had admitted that there was ‘much to be done’ to decentralise psychiatric services and the Welsh Office had arranged for a further independent review of mental illness services jointly by the NHS Health Advisory Services and Social Work Services of the Welsh Office between 1985/86-87. So the crooks in the NHS ignoring the wrongdoing of Dafydd et al in were going to get together with the crooks in the Social Work Services who were ignoring a paedophile ring operating in Clwyd and Gwynedd Social Services to ‘independently’ review the mental health services. No wonder the patients continued to die and go to prison after being stitched up for crimes that they had not committed. 1985, 86 and 87 were the very years that Alison Taylor, Mary Wynch and me all presented evidence of the most serious abuses and corruption in the mental health services and children’s services in north Wales. The ‘independent review’ managed not to investigate our allegations.

So the culprits at the helm of the massive cover-up were Dr Pamela Mason, Nicholas Edwards, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Security Norman Fowler and the Home Secretaries covering that period, which were Leon Brittan and Douglas Hurd.

The horror of what was happening is confirmed by another piece that appears in the Bulletin. In June 1985 John Patten confirmed that under the complaints procedures for special hospitals managed directly by the DHSS ie. Broadmoor, Ashworth and Rampton, a proportion of complaints went straight to Ministry Officials at the DHSS. Patten stated that the procedures for dealing with the complaints were ‘well-established’. Referring to a matter that was reported in Oct 1984 that was requested to be investigated – although details of the matter concerned were not revealed – the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration expressed satisfaction with the way in which complaints made by a Broadmoor patient had been dealt with.

It is now known that in 1985, patients in the special hospitals were being physically and sexually abused, that child porn was being passed around these ‘hospitals’, that children were taken onto the premises to visit patients who were paedophiles and that nearly all the women patients had been sexually abused before they ever got near these places. The DHSS clearly knew about this as well. Not long after Bluglass wrote this Bulletin, Baroness Trumpington thought that the answer to all this was to appoint Jimmy Savile as manager of Broadmooor. What could ever go wrong?

The Bulletin also reveals that in July 1985 the Minister for Health Ken Clarke stated that the determination of the criteria for registering nursing homes lay with the District Health Authority in whose area the home was located. Clarke was satisfied that the existing codes of practice were of sufficiently high standard without being too strict. In the event of a dispute between a proprieter of the nursing home and the DHA, the matter would be determined by an appeal to the Registered Homes Tribunal, which the Gov’t had set up.

In 1985 complaints of abuse and neglect of patients in ‘nursing homes’ run by Dr Dafydd Alun Jones were common. The situation in one of these ‘homes’ for psychiatric patients in Llandudno, Holyrood House, was so bad that it eventually became a national scandal and was even featured by Esther on ‘That’s Life’. Patients were being beaten up and a drug addict from Liverpool was responsible for the drugs cabinet. Before Holyrood House hit the national media, MIND knew what was going on there, Jones’s colleague Dr Tony Francis (Dr X) knew what was going on, as did the Local Authority covering the Llandudno area. The Health Authority will have known as well. As for the Registered Homes Tribunal – a previous post mentions that Councillors in Clwyd were sitting on those Tribunals. Clwyd County Council knew that a paedophile ring was operating in it’s children’s homes and did nothing. Some people – such as Tory MP Beata Brookes – sat on both Clwyd County Council/Social Services and Clwyd Health Authority. Clwyd Health Authority was the employer of Dr Dafydd Alun Jones.

This was a system that could not have been designed by accident.

We can see that it was no accident from another feature in the Bulletin, which makes a reference to Lord David Ennals holding a debate on the future of St Thomas’s Hospital. Tommy’s was indeed under threat in the 1980s. Tommy’s remained unscathed. I wonder why that was? It only educated and employed all those leading lights in the British medical establishment – including the Dallys – who then all went to war on each other when the police started investigating Ann Dally.

The Bulletin reveals that in July 1985-86 the Minister of Health estimated the cost of the Mental Health Act Commission to be £1,022,000. A previous post details how the Mental Health Act Commission colluded with the north Wales mental health services and lied to me after I complained to them about being unlawfully detained in north Wales by Dafydd et al. Tessa Jowell was a member of that Commission.

So Norman Fowler was happy to spend approx. 1 million pa to conceal organised crime involving child abuse in the British welfare state, including the Westminster Paedophile Ring.

The Bulletin reveals that the Chairman of the Social Services Committee in the Commons at this time – who would have been in a position to ask some very awkward questions about this catalogue of horrors but noticeably didn’t – was a Renee Short.

Short was the Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East and was considered a ‘firebrand’, a female politician on the left of the party. Renee championed women’s and children’s issues! I think that we have been here before. Short was sponsored by the TGWU, was mates with trade unionist Jack Jones and was a member of Labour’s NEC, 1970-88. Short was the representative of the Wimmin’s Section. Short co-sponsored Neil Kinnock for the leadership of the Labour Party. Short’s obituaries tell us that she campaigned on ‘social issues’, including women in prison and on behalf of junior hospital doctors no less. So appreciative of her efforts were the Top Doctors that they made Renee a lay member of the MRC. Short ended up in a battle in her own constituency and was deselected – it was blamed on Militant, but one wonders whether she’d pissed a few other people off as well. She resigned after making a deal with Kinnock that if she did this, she would be rewarded with a peerage – although Kinnock wasn’t able to stump up one of those for her. In 2007 the Daily Mail carried an article about Renee’s granddaughter, who had become ‘hooked on drugs at 15’. Renee’s granddaughter bangs on about the irony of this, as her grandmother had been a well-known ‘anti-drugs campaigner’. I hate to disillusion Renee’s family, but if Renee had really wanted to make a difference in this area, all she needed to have done was make the activities of Dr Dafydd Alun Jones public during all those years that she Chaired the Select Committee on Social Services, ie. 1979-87. But Renee remained completely silent, as well as remaining silent on the reality of what was happening in children’s homes, in the special hospitals and indeed in women’s prisons. Because speaking out would have upset the Top Doctors as well as the numerous other people who knew that children were being sexually abused by politicians from all parties, as well as others.

I can only wonder why Short didn’t end up in the Lords along with all the others who colluded with and concealed organised child abuse. Why ever did old Kinnock fail to come up with the goods?

The Bulletin also published an angry letter concerning junior doctors training from a Dr Julie Hollyman, of the College Trainees Committee of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. A previous post details how by 1990 Hollyman had become a truly vile consultant at Springfield Hospital, the psychiatric unit attached to St Georges who was hated by her colleagues. Hollyman was given management responsibilities at Springfield. A number of patients were raped and sexually assaulted on her watch. She was then appointed to lead Broadmoor.

Can I ask Lord John Patten, David Mellor, Ken Clarke, Dr Pamela Mason, Lady Tessa Jowell, William Bingley, Lord David Ennals, Lord Simon Glenarthur, Lord Crickhowell, Norman Fowler, Leon Brittan – or at least those of them who are still alive – how they manage to sleep at night in their expensive residences surrounded by everything that they ever need as their glorious careers approach their end?

Now for a bit of background on some of Ann Dally’s friends and supporters.

Ann was at Tommy’s with Dr Michael O’Donnell who was sympathetic to her and seems to have used his position to muster support for her. O’Donnell came from Yorkshire where his own father had been a GP. O’Donnell himself practiced as a GP in Surrey for 12 years and then gave up medicine completely to pursue a media career. He had never spent that much time doing medicine anyway – he boasted about being a ‘part-time’ medical student, as a result of spending so much time pursuing other interests, including cricket, theatre and writing. O’Donnell knew many people who later became very big in the media world – such as David Frost and the members of Monty Python – from his time in Footlights at Cambridge. He later became a ubiquitous presence on Radio 4 and BBC TV, presenting light entertainment shows. Some of his programmes came under fire for being too shallow and flippant, even for BBC light entertainment. O’Donnell also worked for Yorkshire Television and Associated Television. O’Donnell edited World Medicine for 16 years, a sort of cliquey self-congratulatory publication of the sort that Top Doctors really love. He was forced to resign in 1982 after a dispute with the publisher. The senior editorial staff resigned in sympathy and the publication folded two years later. O’Donnell worked as a Times columnist but resigned when the editor Sir Harold Evans was forced to resign.

One of O’Donnell’s many jobs was as scientific advisor on the Lindsay Anderson film ‘O Lucky Man’. ‘O Lucky Man’ is a film which highlights corruption within the British establishment, including medicine. Some parts of ‘O Lucky Man’ are frighteningly accurate. Yet throughout his career O’Donnell made no real attempt to challenge the terrible reality in medicine that he undoubtedly knew about. He was rude about the ‘medical establishment’ and liked to think if himself as a rebel, but he was far too busy farting around on ‘Stop The Week’ or ‘My Word’ to raise serious questions about the institutionalised corruption that was ruining lives and leaving some people dead.

O’Donnell mobilised massive support for his campaign to reform the GMC, but the results were so limited that he might as well have not bothered. The GMC continued to protect dangerous doctors and put patients at risk – O’Donnell himself sat on the GMC Council until 1996 and for the last two years he was Chairman of the Standards Committee. Dafydd et al continued in their own sweet way, as of course did Harold Shipman.

O’Donnell’s own explanation was that the ‘reform’ of the GMC stopped when Sir (later Lord) John Richardson retired as President.

John Richardson was President of the GMC 1973-80. He was President of the BMA 1970-71 and of the Royal Society for Medicine 1969-71. He was Chair of the Joint Consultants Committee 1967-72. He trained and worked at Tommy’s, as did most other people involved in this story. Richardson had at one point attended King George VI and was Harold Macmillan’s personal physician for 40 years – he became good friends with Macmillan. Like O’Donnell, Richardson was from Yorkshire – Richardson’s own father was a solicitor from Sheffield. Richardson retired from Tommy’s in 1975. In his capacity as President of the GMC he regularly met Ministers, including Barbara Castle whilst she was Secretary of State at the DHSS, 1974-76, when she did battle with the Top Doctors over pay beds in the NHS. Richardson was also Vice-President of the RCN from 1972 – it helps to have the Top Doctors controlling the other professions who know what they get up to.

Richardson was also consulting physician to King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers; Consultant Emeritus to the British Army and Consultant Physician to the Metropolitan Police 1957-80. He was given a peerage in 1979 and campaigned from the Lords to stop the proposed closure of A&E at Tommy’s.

Richardson’s obituary in the Guardian described him as a ‘networker’ who was ‘never one to miss an opportunity’, ‘who did no significant research and was not a brilliant physician’. He was ‘ambitious, sometimes fawning’ and the medical students at Tommy’s tagged him ‘Sir John’ before he actually acquired his baronetcy – which was given to him by Macmillan in 1960.

Richardson retired to north Devon. Did anyone really expect a man with his biography to ‘reform’ the GMC?

Along with Michael O’Donnell, Diana Brahams was another high profile medical writer who was sympathetic to Dally. Brahams was everywhere in the 80s and 90s, she was usually invited to comment on ethical or medico-legal issues of that time. I have only just learnt that Brahams worked for the MDU – that was certainly never made clear when she was presented in the media as a ‘barrister’ who was an ‘expert’. Documents in my possession demonstrate that between 1985-1992 (at least) the MDU knew the extent of the wrongdoing in the north Wales mental health services and continued to act for Dr Tony Francis (Dr X) even though they knew that he was perjuring himself and they themselves had advised him to not to pursue litigation against me. Nonetheless, in 1991, Sir Robert Francis QC, whilst acting for the MDU, attempted to have me imprisoned on the instructions of Tony Francis.

Brahams seems to be based in north London near St John’s Wood and is a founder member of ‘Healthwatch’, which states that it is for ‘science and integrity in medicine’. Members include Professor Michael Baum the surgeon, Professor Susan Bewley (the daughter of two other Top Doctors, Thomas and Beulah Bewley, of whom I will be writing more later in this post) and Heinz Wolff, the man who starred on the BBC in an attempt to incite an interest in science among people of my generation when we were children. The Patron of ‘Healthwatch’ is Lord Dick Taverne – someone else known to this blog.

Brahams is also a Trustee of the Medico-Legal Society – a ‘charity’, whose registered address is Hempsons offices in London. Hempsons are the solicitors of the MDU. The stated object of the Medico-Legal Society is ‘to promote medico-legal knowledge in all its aspects’. Their meetings take place at the Medical Society of London.

Another Trustee of the Medico-Legal Society is Dr Kate Allsopp. Dr Kate Allsopp is mentioned regularly in Ann Dally’s book. Kate was a friend of Ann’s. Ann mentiones in her book that Kate was a useful person to have on side because she was shortly to become the Joint Deputy Secretary, ‘the second in command’ of the MDU. Ann was also on good terms with Dr John Wall, who later became Secretary of the MDU.

The President of the Medico-Legal Society is Dr Daniel Haines. Dr Haines doubles up as the honorary treasurer of the Royal Society of Medicine. After serving in the Falklands conflict – during which time he was taken prisoner – Daniel returned to London and worked as a GP, as well as a police surgeon with the Metropolitan Police. Daniel is now involved in expert witness work – he specialises in rape and child sexual abuse no less. Well Daniel, as an expert in the field, you certainly have an awful lot of colleagues who have worked for the MDU whom you can quiz for details…

Another medical writer who supported Dally was Dr Ian Munro. Munro trained at Guy’s and was Deputy Editor of the Lancet, 1965-76 and then Editor, 1976-88. Munro wrote many of the Lancet’s anonymous editorials, including one in 1983 which was a robust attack on the Secretary of State Norman Fowler, demanding his resignation – but not because of a high level cover-up of the Westminster Paedophile Ring, rather because of NHS strikes. If only they’d have all stayed on strike, they wouldn’t have been facilitating a paedophile ring in north Wales and flogging drugs. Or perjuring themselves in order to try and imprison people who’d dared complain about them.

Ian Munro was also an early and consistent champion of Wendy Savage.

Munro was known to have been ‘accessible to his colleagues in Fleet Street even in unsocial hours’. Top Doctors Calling, Top Doctors Calling…

Ian Munro was also from Yorkshire – from Bradford. He retained a lifelong involvement with Yorkshire County Cricket Club.

One of Ann’s friends from Tommy’s was Dr Elizabeth Fletcher – Fletcher acted as a character witness for Ann. Elizabeth Fletcher’s claim to fame was that after working as a GP, she became Chief Medical Officer at the BBC, 1975-80. She’ll have known about Savile then. Ann’s book mentions that among her patients were a number of senior employees of the BBC. Frank Bough was famously publicly identified as enjoying coke and prostitutes and of course Stephen Fry that well-known MIND ambassador boasted of snorting coke in Buck House – they won’t have minded Stephen, they were patients of the Dallys – but there will be many more at the BBC who enjoy recreational chemicals who haven’t been outed by the tabloids. Perhaps because the tabloid journos had become friends with them after meeting them in Ann Dally’s waiting room.

Austen Kark was another character witness for Ann. Austen was a journalist and a BBC Executive. Austen started at the BBC in 1954. He was mostly involved with the World Service and was its MD, 1984-86.

Austen was part of the comfortable north London set as well, he lived in Islington.

A third character witness for Ann was Lady Zaida Ramsbotham. Ann states frankly in her book that her lawyers had selected Lady Zaida as a character witness because of her title – Ann was told that ‘it helps’. (Sir Jimmy Savile???) Zaida only became Lady Zaida after she married Sir Peter Ramsbotham, Britain’s former Ambassador to Washington – who was appointed by Ted Heath. Ramsbotham was described as an ‘old fashioned snob’, which his friends maintained was a ‘gross’ ‘unjust’ charge. Even if being a Lady meant that his wife was useful to a dealer when she was in hot water. Ramsbotham enjoyed a warm friendship with President Jimmy Carter.

When he retired in 1980, Peter Ramsbotham became a Trustee of the Leonard Cheshire Foundation; Chair of the Ryder-Cheshire Mission for the Relief of Suffering; a Director of Lloyds Bank and of the Commercial Union Assurance Co. He was a member of the Garrick and was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire in 1992.

Zaida married Peter in 1985 and thus acquired a title that impressed people. Before that she was Dr Zaida Hall. Her obituary from the British Journal of Psychiatry tells us that she was one of the first women students at St George’s Hospital Medical School and that she did her psychiatry training at the Maudsley. In 1971 Zaida Hall was appointed as the first female consultant psychiatrist at Southampton University/the Royal South Hants Hospital. She built up the psychotherapy dept and also worked at Red Hatch Remand Centre in Winchester for ‘delinquent girls’. Zaida was honest enough to admit that most of the ‘delinquent girls’ had been physically or sexually abused. Zaida started group therapy for female survivors of sexual abuse and later for male survivors as well. Zaida Hall used her position to publish and promote women’s mental health. Hall famously did battle with the group of therapists who publicised the notion of ‘false memory’. Which is a minefield. The wonderful thing about the notion of false memory is that it can be used to discredit the claims survivors of sexual abuse. But then so can the notion that false memory doesn’t exist. It all depends upon who’s accusing who and who the therapist is. But then nearly all psychotherapeutic notions can be used to discredit people who have been abused. Which is why the discipline has proved so useful. St George’s specialise in it and Dafydd learnt at the knee of Bob Hobson, one of Britain’s most prominent psychotherapists at the Maudsley. So you can’t argue with that. As Dafydd once told me himself in 1987 when I accused him of the most appalling corruption – after he had me arrested on trumped up charges of ‘trying to stab a psychiatrist’. The psychiatrist who made the statement maintaining that I had done this worked for Dafydd and later admitted that I hadn’t tried to stab him after all. He was never disciplined or charged himself, although I would have gone to prison if the police had not got to the truth. In fact Dafydd was so certain that this scam would be successful that he even wrote to the Mental Health Acts Commission and told them that I had been sent to Risley Remand Centre for trying to stab a psychiatrist – and they wrote back to him confirming it!

You jumped the gun there boys…and the incriminating letters are now in my possession.

A close friend of Ann’s was Dr Dale Beckett, again someone based in Islington. Dale Beckett had interests in drug addiction, hypnotherapy, NLP and the ‘spiritual aspect of emotional disorders’. Beckett acted as an expert witness for Dally.

Another friend was Roger Toulmin who had worked as a radio producer for the BBC and for the Times. Toulmin then became a civil servant in the DHSS. He guided the Committee of Top Doctors, nurses and midwives under the Chairmanship of Dame Alice Munro which resulted in the 1985 Report ‘Maternity Care In Action’. Ann stressed that Toulmin was a ‘bachelor’ which made his interest in the welfare of women and young children all the more impressive. Unfortunately though dear old Roger and Dame Alice didn’t manage to improve anything – Maternity Care In Action in the UK is still not what it should be and we have mortality rates for mothers and babies that are worse than some of the countries that we enjoy sneering at and imagine that their citizens are all trying to make their way to the UK to use our glorious NHS.

Ann was also friendly with Dr James Willis, who ran the drug dependency service on Merseyside before Dr John Marks took it over. I mentioned John Marks (not to be confused with the Dr John Marks who was head of the BMA for many years) previously. Marks acted as an expert witness for Dally. He ran the Chapel Street Clinic in Widnes, where he legally prescribed maintenance doses of heroin and cocaine. Great results were claimed, including by the Cheshire Drug Squad – the thing that everyone was most impressed with at the time was that none of John Marks’ patients died from AIDS. John Marks was basically hounded out and the clinic shut down in 1995. Marks himself maintains that he believes that his clinic was shut down after the US current affairs programme 60 Minutes screened a programme about his clinic in 1990. The US Republican administration became aware of the clinic, it’s methods and it’s success and Marks alleges that they put pressure on the British Gov’t to close it. Bing Spear was an enthusiastic supporter of John Marks’ clinic and rang Marks a few months after the programme was screened, claiming that there was ‘real heat’ from the embassy in Washington and that Thatcher had ‘got her knickers in a twist’.

It is alleged that Bing resigned after Marks’ clinic was closed and was replaced by an Alan MacFarlane, who considered John Marks to be ‘dangerous’.

There is a discrepancy here that I have not been able to get to the bottom of. It is alleged that Bing resigned as a consequence of Marks being shut down. Yet Bing Spear retired in 1986 – the TV programme wasn’t screened until 1990 and Marks’ clinic didn’t close until 1995. So at least some of this story isn’t true.

However, I can well-imagine that Dr John Marks, if he was running a highly successful clinic for drug addicts which was becoming famous, would have faced opposition from just about everybody. There would be the usual complaints from the neighbourhood of ‘we don’t want these sorts of people here’ – and the neighbours would be really worried about that clinic expanding. There would be the anxieties re property prices and the fate of neighbouring businesses. But Marks would also be loathed by the rest of the medical establishment as well – they were screwing up big time, so they really won’t have wanted him up in Widnes showing them up for the fools that they were. Furthermore, Marks’ clinic was alleged to have put local illicit drug dealers out of business – there was no call for their products anymore. Organised drug trafficking is big business and involves many ‘respectable’ people – they’ll have wanted John Marks out of the way. And of course there was the utter embarrassment that was Dafydd just down the A55 in north Wales – a whole pyramid of corruption and bad practice depended upon the continued presence of Dafydd and John Marks would have presented a major threat to all of it. Addicts were not going to waste their time and money with Dafydd if there was a man just next door on the Wirral from whom they could receive a service.

So Dafydd stayed in business and Dr Marks emigrated to New Zealand.

Nice result US Republican party, whose members did not have to live with the effects of Dafydd and the paedophiles’ friends.

Other writers who supported Dally included George Mikes, a journalist known for his humorous articles. Papers that he wrote for included the Observer and the Times Literary Supplement. Mikes’ had worked for the BBC’s Hungarian Service. Mikes was a member of the Garrick and was a good friend of Arthur Koestler – who was alleged to have been highly abusive to women. The journalist Jill Tweedie wrote an article in her later years describing how Koestler had violently raped her when she was young. Andrew Veitch also covered the case sympathetically – Veitch was born in Wrexham no less. His journalism received awards from, among others, paedophiles’ friends the Royal Television Society and the Terence Higgins Trust. Andrew Tyler wrote a piece for Time Out that Ann really loved – a ‘frank’ article that ‘frightened’ the Home Office and the drug dependency establishment. Tyler was a rock journalist who had worked for the NME. In 1996 he became the Director of Animal Aid. Sadly he developed Parkinsons – he chose to die at the Dignitas clinic.

Bill Nelles was also a supporter of Dally and a former addict patient of hers. Nelles was the Drugs Education Officer at the Terence Higgins Trust at the time. He went on to work for West Berkshire Health Authority, training doctors and drug users. He later became the HIV co-ordinator for North Birmingham Health Authority, the HIV co-ordinator for Harrow and Hillingdon NHS Community Trust and then in 1999 the CEO of the Methadone Alliance. He now lives and works in Canada.

Dally received a substantial amount of TV coverage, particularly after her case. She had much contact with John Ware the producer of Panorama, although she was disappointed at the Panorama programme that was eventually screened. She complained that it featured such unsavoury matters as ‘housing estates and crime on Merseyside’. Which doesn’t look quite as good as Harley Street and Belgravia, which were the stamping grounds of Ann’s patients. Dally later discovered that Ware had done a deal with the GMC and had only screened what they had approved.

Ann featured in ‘Hypotheticals’, a TV programme in which a barrister questioned people on opposing sides of an argument. Dally’s book noted that the ‘young barrister’ hosting the programme was a Jane Belson. Jane Belson eventually became Mrs Douglas Adams of ‘Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy’ fame. After graduating from Oxford, Belson worked for the Treasury. She lived with Adams in Islington and after a few diplomatic incidents they got married. They moved to LA, then to California and later returned to London. Belson and Adam were networked to an enormous circle of celebs, including many at the BBC.

Sir Henry Yellowlees also took part in the ‘Hypotheticals’ programme, opposing Ann – Yellowlees had been on the GMC panel for one of her hearings. Yellowlees was Chief Medical Officer for the DHSS, 1973-84. He had previously held a sequence of appointments on the Regional Hospital Boards (one of the Regional Hospital Board’s ran the North Wales Hospital Denbigh in the era when Gwynne the lobotomist was busy as well as Dafydd); he was seconded to the Ministry of Health in 1963 as Principal Medical Officer, after which he received promotion regularly; in 1976 he was appointed Sir George Godber’s Deputy. Godber was CMO, 1960-73 – he has a God-like status in NHS history because he was instrumental in forming the NHS. Yellowlees had battles with Barbara Castle between 1974-76 when she was trying to remove pay beds from the NHS – this led to industrial action from the Top Doctors and then industrial action from the ancillary staff who refused to provide services for patients in pay beds. So there was great trouble from those self-sacrificing NHS staff.

Yellowlees was the son of a psychiatrist himself. He left the DHSS in 1983 and then spent a year at the MoD, working on a new structure for the medical staff in the armed services; he was also a consultant to WHO. Yellowlees was a member of MRC for 9 years and a member of the GMC for 10 years. He sat on the NHS Supervisory Board for 10 years. Yellowlees served under Secretaries of State Keith Joseph, Barbara Castle, David Ennals, Norman Fowler and Patrick Jenkin.

Ken Clarke’s autobiography maintains that Yellowlees was a dreadful old bugger who’s main concern was to ascertain which Top Doctors would receive which honours.

Someone who appeared on ‘Hypotheticals’ in support of Ann was one of her patients, Carlin Wilkowski. Carlin still has quite an internet presence – she describes herself as an ‘addict mother’ and seems to be based in Highgate.

Dr Cindy Fazey, a criminologist from Liverpool, offered to act as an expert witness for Dally. Fazey has been the Professor of International Drug Policy at Liverpool University since 1998. She is the former Chief of Demand Reduction for the UN Control Programme. Fazey’s husband may well have proved useful to Dally as well – Ian Fazey is a journalist. He was the northern correspondent for the Financial Times during the 80s and worked for the paper until 1996. He and Cindy met whilst they were students at Aston University and Ian began his career on the Birmingham Post. He then moved to the Liverpool Daily Post where he became Deputy Editor, before becoming the General Manager of the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo in 1976.

The Liverpool Daily Post is the sister paper of the Daily Post which serves north Wales. The Daily Post is a real laugh because for years it has so obviously served as a PR sheet for the paedophiles’ friends. Dafydd himself was regularly featured in there as the centre of flattering profiles until he became very elderly. The most offensive thing that I ever read in the Daily Post was an ‘interview’ with Dafydd back in the early 1990s, in which Dafydd was asked a series of utterly obsequious questions, including one which made reference to Dafydd being known to be ‘attractive to women’ and asking him why he thought this was. This was a man who was sexually exploiting female patients – whom he had unlawfully imprisoned in a hell-hole of an asylum – whilst facilitating a paedophile ring. What did the Daily Post think that they were doing? Dafydd’s patients were universally revolted by him – not only was he unpleasant and unhinged, but he was filthy. He smelt, his teeth were green, his clothes were dirty and he was always covered in dandruff. A copy of the Daily Post was circulated around the psychiatric ward in Ysbyty Gwynedd on the day that article was published and I actually witnessed two male psych nurses – two with a sense of humour – being told that there was a photo of Dafydd in the paper. One of them yelled out ‘have they captured the dandruff?’ and they then both fell about laughing because even in the photo, you could see that Dafydd had his regular covering on the shoulders of his suit. This man worked in hospitals where the degree of ‘illness’ in patients was partially judged on whether their ‘personal hygiene’ was up to scratch. It was utterly nonsensical, like most of UK psychiatry.

Jeremy Laurance wrote articles in a number of publications about Dally. The article he wrote for New Society was described by Dally as ‘disappointing’. She was cross because Laurance had ‘invented’ a bit about Dally treating an addict in the Royal Family. Dally also became vexed with the Sunday Times for having the temerity to publish that she had a pop star among her patients and surprise surprise, they had even ‘got hold of the idea that I was psych to Princess Margaret’. How did these publications ever draw such conclusions? Because Peter and Ann Dally talked about it that’s how.

Dally intriguingly states that ‘later Jeremy was converted to my way of thinking’ and along with his Editor David Lipsey, became a ‘useful supporter’. David Lipsey ended up receiving a peerage from Tony Blair – he was named and shamed as one of Tony’s Cronies. Lipsey worked on the Sunday Times, the Sunday Correspondent, the Times, the Guardian and the Economist. He had been an advisor to Tony Crosland when Crosland was in opposition and an advisor to No 10. He was Chair of Streatham Labour Party, 1970-72 and Chair of the Fabian Society, 1982-83.

Obviously with Ann Dally entering into battle with the police, the Home Office Inspectorate, the GMC and the Court of Appeal at various times during the 80s, she had extensive dealings with lawyers. Although from what I saw in north Wales the MDU do an excellent job of defending Top Doctors even when they know that the Top Doctors concerned have been involved in serious criminal conduct, Ann Dally had a low opinion of the MDU, repeatedly stating that she did not trust them and was disenchanted with them. Her poor opinion of them seems to have stemmed from an incident when she had acted as an ‘expert witness’ for another Top Doctor who stood accused of questionable practices with drug addicts. Dally arrived at the Temple for a legal conference regarding this man’s case, only to be told by the clerk that no conference had been arranged. The solicitor from the MDU arrived and was told the same thing. It transpired that a conference HAD been arranged, but no-one had told the Counsel, so he’d gone home. Therefore the conference would have to be rearranged. The main concern of the man from the MDU was how expensive this was. Yet everyone involved had been retained by the MDU – so whoever had screwed up was working for the MDU.

The solicitor upon whom Ann relied extensively was a friend of hers, John Calderon, who did not work for the MDU but who worked in the City. Calderon recommended Christopher Sumner as Counsel. John also wanted Dally to use Hempsons, the MDU solicitors but she flatly refused. Despite this, the MDU did agree to pay for John Calderon’s representation, although the MDU wanted to be present at all meetings with lawyers. The MDU also funded Dally’s (unsuccessful) appeal to the Privy Council House of Lords Judicial Committee after she was barred from prescribing by the GMC.

Calderon wanted a Top Doctor to sit in with the lawyers and comment on the scientific evidence in Ann’s case. The Top Doctor selected to do this was none other than Dr John Harman, Harriet’s dad. One of the many comments following my post ‘Wheels Within Wheels Or Flies Drawn To The Same Incestuously Corrupt Shithouse?’ mentions the role that John Harman played in defending John Bodkin Adams, a Top Doctor who killed his patients. Dally describes John Harman as having ‘one of the best brains I knew for exposing medical guff’.

Dally liked Christopher Sumner. Sir Christopher Sumner as he became was appointed a Circuit judge in 1987, a High Court judge in 1996 and ended up in the Court of Appeal. He worked as an advocate and a High Court judge in the Family Division.

When John Calderon was unavailable for Dally’s appeal – he was on holiday – Dally used the services of another solicitor, John Kelleher. Kelleher is now a partner in Carey Olsen and practices in Jersey. In 1994 Kelleher became an Advocate of the Royal Court of Jersey and in 2017 he was appointed President of the Law Society of Jersey. As the appeal approached, Calderon told Dally that ‘the Law Lords feel that they need to keep in with the doctors’. The barrister Diana Brahams believed that the Privy Council took the view that doctors are the best people to discipline other doctors. Dally observed that there is a close relationship between the GMC and the Privy Council (who hear appeals against GMC decisions) – they hand out honours to each other.

In one of Ann’s hearings, William Gage was the lead barrister who was engaged by Calderon. Ann didn’t take to Gage and told Neil Taylor QC – Counsel who was also advising – that she felt uncomfortable with him. She was told by Taylor that it wasn’t Gage’s job to make her feel at ease, he was there ‘to get you off’ and that he was good at getting clients off. Gage is now Sir William Gage. He became the presiding judge of the South Eastern Circuit, then a High Court judge in 1993 and then a Lord Justice of Appeal in 2004. Gage Chaired the Public Inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa.

After Dally lost her appeal, the MDU paid for the opinion of Anthony Lester QC, who specialised in European law, with a view to taking the case to the Court of Human Rights, although Dally didn’t end up following this course of action.

At one point the MDU instructed Anthony Johnston of Beachcrofts to act for Dally.

Dr David Marjot acted as an expert witness for Dally. Dally describes Marjot as a critic of the drugs dependency establishment who ran a DDU clinic himself. Dally stated that he was the only such doctor in London who was in such a position and that he too had suffered after ‘speaking out’. Marjot was one of the few doctors who held a heroin licence. Between 1976-93, he was consultant psychiatrist for the Regional Alcohol and DDU at Ealing. He was visiting consultant psychiatrist for Wormwood Scrubs, 1976-99 and locum forensic psychiatrist for Broadmoor, 1994-96. Yes, another one who stood and watched as Savile did his worst… In 2014 David Marjot wrote a very angry letter into the BMJ concerning the case of a surgeon who had been in front of the GMC for shouting and swearing at colleagues. Marjot had penned a blistering attack on the GMC, quoting the Francis Report into the Mid-Staffs scandal, reminding everyone that even in that case, the failings had been institutional rather than personal. Whilst I would agree with Marjot that staff working in the NHS can be seriously hampered by a foolish managerial regime in which an obsession with targets is pursued at all costs, that cannot always excuse what happens in the NHS and it didn’t excuse what happened at Mid-Staffs. By the way Marjot – when you were working at Broadmoor, the crazy regime of targets was not in place. But that didn’t stop Savile and others grossly abusing the patients – and it wasn’t targets that bought your silence on the matter.

After Dally was prevented from prescribing, a Dr Colin Brewer took over many of her patients. Dally described Brewer as a man who had ‘had a change of heart’ and had converted to her way of thinking. He certainly did. Brewer didn’t just open one clinic to prescribe for addicts on a private basis, he opened several – and then expanded rapidly. Brewer was a roaring success until 2006 when he was struck off by the GMC for inappropriate drug prescribing. His clinic – the Stapleford Addiction Clinic, based in Belgravia – was described as a ‘drugs grocery’ and his patients included Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty. A consequence of the ‘inappropriate prescribing’ which saw Brewer struck off was the death of a patient. The patient had been sent home with a DIY detox kit containing 16 different drugs, including a heroin substitute. Colin Brewer has found a new way of earning a few quid since he was struck off. He now carries out ‘assessments’ for Dignitas. The Daily Mail have taken an interest in Colin Brewer and revealed that he has ‘helped’ at least twelve people to die by saying the right things in his assessments for Dignitas. A lot of those people were not terminally ill. When challenged, Brewer said that because he was no longer on the Register ‘no-one can tell me what to do’. An undercover journalist posed as a thirty-five year old woman with mental health problems and Brewer was prepared to recommend her for the chop as well.

When asked about the activities of Colin Brewer, our esteemed DPP Alison Saunders stated that the CPS was less likely to prosecute doctors assisting in deaths of patients who were not under their direct care – critics say that Brewer exploited this.

So who were the Top Doctors who sat in judgement over Ann Dally and who found her wanting but didn’t actually put her out of business, even when she continued to prescribe controlled drugs after she was barred by the GMC? I have mentioned that one was Sir Henry Yellowlees.

Another was the President of the GMC at the time, Sir (later Lord) John Walton. Walton was a neurologist who held every big job in medicine. He was President of the BMA 1980-82; President of the GMC 1982-89; President of the Royal Society of Medicine 1984-86. He was knighted in 1979 and after his distinguished stint at the GMC – during which all those very serious complaints about Dafydd were not acted upon, even the one that involved a death – Walton picked up his peerage in 1989. So how did this lethal old bastard climb to the top?

Walton qualified at Newcastle Medical School, when it was still part of Durham University. In 1959 he was appointed consultant neurologist at the University of Newcastle Hospitals and in 1968 he was awarded a Chair in neurology at Newcastle. Walton was a specialist in muscular dystrophy. In 1971 he became Dean of the Medicine at Newcastle, a post he retained until 1981. He also sat on various hospital management committees. In 1983 he was appointed Warden of Green College, Oxford.

Walton was Vice-President of the World Federation of Neurology in 1981 and then President, 1989-97. He was President of the Association for British Neurology, 1987-88.

Walton arrived in the Lords whilst the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill was passing through Parliament, which allowed experiments on embryos for up to 14 days after fertilisation. Walton supported the Bill and Lord Stallard (Jock Stallard, a former Labour MP) was so opposed to it that he tried to prevent Walton becoming Chair of the Medical Ethics Select Committee. Stallard failed in this – well Walton was a Top Doctor wasn’t he, of course he would be the best choice where ethics were concerned. Walton also remained loyal to his old medical school once he arrived in the Lords – he used his position to gain GMC approval for Newcastle’s development of a medical school in Malaysia and much more recently he secured Parliamentary approval for Newcastle’s work on mitochondrial research (that’s the really controversial work that a lot of people are very worried about). In 2014 Newcastle University opened the John Walton Muscular Dystrophy Research Centre.

Walton remained a very influential figure in the north east and was made Freeman of the City of Newcastle.

I suspect that Walton occupying that Chair of the Ethics Committee may have caused a great deal of damage. As I am fairly certain did Walton himself for many years. Walton came from NEWCASTLE – Dr Neil Davies and Prof Bob Woods who colluded with the wrongdoing in north Wales were both working at Newcastle before they arrived to work in the mental health services in north Wales. The Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal happened on Walton’s old patch – which provided such a useful muddying of the waters where organised child sexual abuse was concerned just when some of us were trying to draw attention to the wrongdoing in north Wales.

There is one position that Walton held which is completely inconsistent with his whole career. Between 2012-15 he was President of the Association of the College of Occupational Therapists. Apart from Alison Taylor the Gwynedd social worker who was sacked by her boss Lucille Hughes – Dafydd’s mistress – back in the late 1980s, there has only ever been one whistleblower in Gwynedd. That was a senior occupational therapist at the Hergest Unit, who for years blew and blew and blew. Although he undoubtedly saved a few lives by actually looking after his patients, this man’s grave concerns were ignored. The small team of occupational therapists working with him were all excellent as well. The whistleblower was sent to Coventry by virtually the whole hospital and retired a few years ago – after he retired, every one of his colleagues was hounded out. This man was offered a job to build up occupational therapy as a discipline in the School of Healthcare Sciences at Bangor University but turned it down because of the bad practice that he knew was prevalent in that School. The job was instead taken by a Louise Ingham, who had previously worked as an occupational therapist for mental health patients in the community in Gwynedd. Who knows exactly how dangerous and corrupt the mental health services in north Wales are and who neglected her own patients shockingly – I witnessed one case of this myself.

So who on earth invited John Walton to preside over the occupational therapists at a national level?

One of the members of one of the GMC panels before whom Dally appeared was Dr Betty Tylden. Betty Tylden had worked under William Sargant at Tommy’s – as had Ann’s husband. Tylden’s expertise was in addiction – and child abuse, cults and mind control.

The hearing of the GMC into Dally’s conduct that occurred as a result of her continuing to prescribe controlled drugs after the GMC had barred her from doing this was Chaired by Professor Robert Duthie. Duthie was an orthopaedic surgeon from Oxford. In 1971 he had acted as an advisor to the DHSS. He was also a member of the Royal Commission on Civil Liability and Personal Injury. Duthie was President of the British Orthopaedic Association in 1984. So he’ll have known the corrupt Medical Ombudsman for Wales Professor Robert Owen, who concealed the wrongdoing of Dafydd et al in the late 1980s – Owen was Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Liverpool University.

On the panel alongside Robert Duthie was Professor Rhilip Rhodes, an obstetrician. Ann Dally had been friends with him when she worked in obstetrics at Tommy’s.

As for the ‘drugs dependency establishment’ whom Dally loathed and who opposed her, a leading light among them was Dr Thomas Bewley, whom I mentioned earlier – the man whom many years later admitted that none of them actually knew what they were doing.

Bewley sat on a lot of Committees, he particularly enjoyed doing that. He was the first sub-dean of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the second Dean, the fifth President, 1984-87 and a member of the Council until 1996.

Bewley had an interesting early career. He was from Dublin and qualified there – his was from a well-known family who founded a small Quaker hospital, Bloomfield and both his father and grandfather ran that. Bewley came to Britain as a young man and took up psychiatry but was repeatedly rejected for training at the Maudsley. He was finally accepted on his fourth application. Bewley stated that he didn’t want to train at Tommy’s because he feared being damaged by William Sargant. In the 1950s Bewley completed his MD thesis at the Maudsley on alcoholism. He then spent time working in psychoanalysis in the US. He returned to run Tooting Bec Hospital (the hospital which so appalled Ann Dally when she was young), where he became a consultant. Bewley went to Tooting Bec because ‘they took people who couldn’t get in anywhere’ – he had difficulty getting a job because he had left the Maudsley ‘prematurely’ and his qualifications were Irish.

Bewley began treating heroin addicts and published in the Lancet. He ‘knew little, but more than everyone else’. Despite this career which involved being almost unemployable and not knowing his arse from his elbow, in a 2007 interview with the British Journal of Psychiatry Bulletin, Thomas Bewley observed that ‘one of the advantages of having an index-linked psychiatrists pension is we can go to the opera as often as we like’. Whilst you ignore a nutter in north Wales who is a colleague of yours who participates in organised crime.

Thomas Bewley’s wife is Dame Beulah Bewley, an epidemiologist. Beulah Bewley was a member of the GMC for a number of years. In fact she was a member of the GMC when her husband reported Ann Dally to them. Beulah Bewley was a Woman In Medicine and even wrote a book about this after she retired. She had been the President of the Women’s Medical Federation on the GMC and was also the treasurer. Despite advertising her credentials as a Woman, Beulah never managed to reign in Dafydd during her time on the GMC as he shagged and sexually harassed his way around north Wales. Beulah boasts of having met many Top People during her career, rubbing shoulders with Royalty as well as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – yeh, well that makes sense, her husband ran a drugs and alcohol clinic.

Someone else who opposed Dally was Professor Robert Priest, honorary consultant at St Mary’s Hospital and one time Chairman of the BMA.

Dr Philip Connell was another Top Doctor with whom Dally clashed. Connell was the first person to identify amphetamine psychosis. Connell liked sitting on Committees even more than Thomas Bewley, Connell sat on just about everything possible, particularly in the field of addiction.

Connell was a Barts graduate who did his postgrad training at the Maudsley. In 1959 he was appointed consultant for developing a children’s and adolescent service at Newcastle General Hospital, in association with Durham University. Six years later he returned to the Maudsley as a consultant where he remained until his retirement in 1986. Connell was a member of Baroness Wootton’s Committee On The Use Of Cannabis; Chair of the Advisory Council On The Misuse of Drugs, 1982-88; Vice-President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists; and a member of the GMC – the Preliminary Screener for Health Procedures. Connell will have known Dafydd then – Dafydd famously claimed to suffer from a ‘nervous illness’ which was used as the excuse when he did something really deranged which couldn’t be concealed in the usual manner.

In the Indie’s obituary of Connell, it was observed that he had ‘an addiction for power and influence in medical organisations, especially those which had an interface with the public and legal affairs’, that ‘his efforts to gain and utilise power were based on self-interest’, that he ‘could be quite boastful’, that he had a ‘tough and barbed exterior’ and that he ‘enjoyed mingling with the great and good’.

Obituaries usually highlight the nicest aspects of people, so I can only presume that Philip Connell was as obnoxious as they come.

Dr John Strang was someone else who did not approve of Ann Dally. Strang led the drug addiction group at the Maudsley for many years. Then he was the Director of the National Addiction Centre; the Head of the Addictions Dept at Kings College London and the Leader of the Addiction Clinical Academic Group of Kings Health Partners.

All these Top Doctors who opposed Ann Dally will have known that Dafydd was building up a drugs empire in north Wales. At one point in the 1980s this lot even held a conference in Llandudno, which was the heart of Dafydd’s drugs and nursing homes empire. So whilst they quaffed and supped, just down the road the residents of Holyrood House were being beaten to a pulp and throughout the region the paedophiles were busy.

There was one Top Doctor whom Dally spoke of approvingly, a man who Knows How It Is because he was an ex-addict himself. That man was Dr Brian Wells.

Life has certainly been good to Dr Brian Wells. He now runs a company called Leading Healthcare International (LHCI), which describes itself as ‘bespoke’, ‘discreet’ and operating by ‘word of mouth’. He set up LHCI in 2002 to provide ‘facilities for patients and families on a global basis’. Brian Wells is also listed at three different London facilities on the BUPA website. But Brian has another website as well – this advertises The Cabin at Chiang Mai in Thailand. Wells is Group Medical Director at The Cabin Addiction Services Group. He explains that his career has been ‘varied’ and that among other things he was the ‘tour doctor’ to a ‘number of well-known artists in the entertainment industry’. The Cabin’s contact details are in Thailand and the website advertises counsellors, mindfulness and meditation. Wells claims that The Cabin uses CBT, the 12 Steps programme and Mindfulness. The Cabin has a ‘partner office’ in the Netherlands and outpatient centres across the globe, including in Bangkok. Although The Cabin is principally concerned with drugs and alcohol addiction, the accompanying blog explains that The Cabin now offers help for porn addiction at the Chiang Mai centre. Presumably Dr Brian will arrange for a few ladyboys to pop over from the Bangkok branch to assist with the therapy.

Brian Wells actually has the letters FRCPsych after his name. He has the official stamp of approval.

Brian was the Medical Director of the main refugee camp during the Cambodian relief operation of 1979/80. He then returned to the UK. He worked at the Maudsley as a consultant psych and set up the largest NHS substance misuse service in the UK, including SHARP, a ‘charitable intensive day-programme’, as well as the Centre for Research on Drugs and Health Behaviour at Imperial. Dr Wells was also the Medical Director of the then Riverside Mental Health NHS Trust, Central London.

Wells has been clinical advisor to a number of international organisations, including health insurance companies and the GMC.

So has anyone rung the drug squad yet to discuss Dr Wells’s business activities with them?

I need to mention one more Top Doctor who receives a passing reference in Dally’s book. That is Dr Dorothy Black, who worked in the Drugs Dept of the DHSS in the 1980s. Like Dr Pamela Mason, a Top Doctor in the employment of Thatcher’s Gov’t whilst this chaos was happening. Dorothy Black’s name cropped up in 1984, in the wake of a truly damning report into Kendall House, a home for ‘girls with problems’ which was run by the Church of England’s Council for Social Responsibility in Gravesend, Kent. The ‘girls with problems’ – what’s the betting that the problem that most of them had was that they had been molested and wouldn’t shut up about it? – were being forcibly injected by a Top Doctor – describing himself interestingly as a ‘psychotherapist’ – with huge doses of anti-psychotics, although none of the girls had diagnoses of mental illness. A TV programme was screened about the Kendall House in 1980 but no action at all was taken. It was only in the wake of the report in 1984 that Dorothy Black felt obliged to comment, stating that she was ‘extremely concerned’ about the ‘storage, monitoring and administration of psychotropic drugs’. In 1986 Kendall House was closed. Many of the girls who were resident there later gave birth to babies with various disabilities – the incidence of birth defects among these babies was so high that many believed there was a link to the huge doses of drugs that the mothers of the babies had been given when they were teenagers at Kendall House.

This sort of mistreatment of young people who dared allege that they had been sexually abused was absolutely routine throughout the 70, 80s and 90s. Everybody who worked in the field knew that it was going on – and huge numbers of the people involved are now employed at the highest levels in the UK’s health and welfare services.

This post has described the idiocy, the lack of integrity and the craziness of many of the people occupying senior positions in the mental health services in the 1980s.

As for the confusion and dilemmas involved in how to approach the problem that was Ann Dally, with the MDU, the GMC, Top Doctors and various lawyers and the Law Lords all bouncing the problem back and forth between them – I rather suspect that this was a result of Princess Margaret’s dealer being placed under investigation by the police. No-one knew what the hell to do so everyone started hitting each other – no wonder Dally wasn’t ever actually struck off. I also suspect that there was corruption in the Home Office Drugs Branch and the DHSS – it would explain why Dally was actively friends with some of the Inspectors and why John Lawson the Senior Inspector who was a soft touch was transferred to cover Wales. Anyone for a War On Drugs?

Thoughout it all, Dafydd conducted business as normal. Supplying boys to the Westminster Paedophile Ring leaves one even more untouchable than being the purveyor of recreational chemicals to the Royals.